Song of Solomon 2:5

Comfort me with apples.

An apple

The term “apple” is a conventional one. By the ancients it was applied indiscriminately to every round fleshy fruit. We require to take into account this extended application of the term, in order to understand the metaphorical allusions to the apple in ancient poetry, classical and oriental. The “apple’ occurs several times in the Bible, but there is abundant reason to believe that it is in almost every case a mistranslation of a word which should have been rendered citron, orange, or quince. The East is not the true home of the apple. It is essentially a Western fruit, the product of the cooler air and moister skies of the north temperate zone. The wild crab-apple, from which all the cultivated varieties have sprung, is a native of most of the countries of Europe; and the development of the fruit has engaged the attention of their inhabitants as far back as we can trace. The tree does not grow wild in the East as it does in our hedges and woodlands, and the ancient Jews were altogether ignorant of apples such as we know them. The apple is appropriately associated by popular tradition with the paradisiacal condition of man, for it belongs to an order of plants that was introduced into the world about the human period. Nature in former epochs had run into rank, luxuriant foliage, but she blossomed and fruited when man came upon the scene. There is a profound relation between the efflorescence of the earth and that of the human soul. The fullest significance of flowers and fruits can only be seen in the life of man, for the illustration of which they furnish innumerable expressive images and analogies. The apple belongs not only to the latest, but also to the highest order of plants. This order is the Rosaceoe, which for beauty of colour, grace of form, perfection of structure, and great and manifold utility, takes precedence of all others. Looking at an apple from a morphological point of view, we find that it is an arrested branch. Instead of going on to develop more wood and foliage, a branch terminates in an apple; and in this apple the sap and substance that would have prolonged the branch are concentrated, and hence its enlarged size and capability of expansion. Looking upon an apple thus as an arrested branch, the branch giving up its own individual life in order that the species may he perpetuated by means of blossom, and fruit, and seed, we behold in it, as in a glass, a very striking natural example of the law of self-sacrifice; that law which pervades all nature, and upon which the welfare and stability of nature depend. And it is a most interesting circumstance, that it is in this self-sacrifice of the plant that all its beauty comes out and culminates. The blossom and fruit in which it gives its own life for another life that is to spring from it are the loveliest of all its parts. God crowns this self-denial and blessing of others with all the glory of colour, and grace of form, and sweetness of perfume, and richness of flavour. The flesh of the apple, it may be remarked, has no purpose to serve in the economy of the plant itself. It is merely an excretion of the plant, produced in large measure by cultivation. And surely this capability of developing flesh which certain fruits possess in relation to the wants of man is one of the most interesting subjects of thought. In this respect man is a fellow-worker with God, in dressing and keeping the great garden of nature so that there shall be trees in it good for food and pleasant to the taste. The nature bound fast in fate has been made fluent by the freedom of the human will; and all the hints and outlines suggested by her roots, and fruits, and flowers are worked out and filled in by man in the exercise of this wondrous Divine gift. Passing strange is it that through this same freedom of will, he should, in the higher moral region, instead of being a fellow-worker with God, be less true to his proper end and destiny than the beasts that perish to their several instincts. Why is an apple round? The circular shape is that in which forces and substances are most perfectly balanced--in which there is the greatest economy of material, and the greatest resistance to external circumstances. It is the most stable of all forms, and therefore, characteristic of bodies in repose. The whole heavens and the whole earth are continually aiming at the spherical form; and they fall to reach or retain it because of their want of repose, insisting upon a shortcoming or departure from the spherical. Thus the apple becomes to us a very significant object, when we see in its round form a striking illustration of the same law that is shaping the earth around us, and the heavens above us, and the heart within us. The skin or rind which hems in the apple, and by limiting completes and individualizes it, is also a most significant feature. It varies in thickness, smoothness, quality of texture, and colour in different varieties of apple; but in all it may be said to pass through the different stages of leaf and flower like the plant that bears it. Wonderful is the ministry of the green skin of plants. It changes inorganic into organic matter, and thus furnishes the starting-point of all life. Nowhere else on the face of the earth does this most important process take place. Everything else consumes and destroys; the green skin of plants alone creates and conserves. It is the mediator between the world of death and the world of life. Hence the significance of the green colour which appears so vividly in all young growing plants. We thus see that the little globe of the apple is a microcosm, representing within its miniature sphere the changes and processes which go on in the great world. Life and death, growth and decay, fight their battle on its humble stage. Fermentation and putrefaction, the two great processes under whose familiarity are hid some of the greatest wonders of the physical world, take place within it. It exhibits the characteristics of the vegetable, animal, and mineral kingdoms; it creates organic matter, and it consumes it; and in its motion within its little orbit, from its formation on the bough in summer to its fall to the ground in autumn, it illustrates the action of the mighty laws which bind the universe together. Our greatest philosopher, by his sublime theory of gravitation, connected it with the stars of heaven; and to avery thoughtful mind it suggests far-reaching ideas which shed light upon the mysteries of ore” own world. (H. Macmillan, D. D.)