Why an apple? Of all symbols on earth, why would the most powerful tech company choose the fruit that once represented rebellion against the Creator? Why a bite missing? Why echo the image that cut humanity off from the Tree of Life?
Because symbols carry power. And this one has been hiding its truth in plain sight.
Jobs and the Bloodline of Eden
Steve Jobs’s biological father, Abdulfattah Jandali, was a Syrian from Homs, a city near the Euphrates River. That same river appears in Genesis as one of the four that watered Eden.
“A river watering the garden flowed from Eden; from there it was separated into four headwaters. The name of the third river is the Tigris. The fourth river is the Euphrates.”
Genesis 2:10–14 (Bible Gateway)
Scripture places Eden in the region where the Tigris and Euphrates still run through what is now Syria, Iraq, and Turkey (Britannica).
So a man whose bloodline comes from the same soil as Eden grows up, crosses the ocean, and gives birth to Apple, a company whose symbol is a bitten apple. The fruit that, in the Genesis story, severed humanity from eternal life.
Coincidence or code?
In the early 1980s, Apple released an ad showing a man standing beside a tree, holding an Apple computer, while a serpent wrapped around the trunk. It was a direct visual lift from Genesis (Engadget).
The first Apple I computer sold for 666.66 dollars (Smithsonian). Steve Wozniak said he liked repeating digits, but the symbolism is impossible to ignore.
A company named for the forbidden fruit. A missing bite. A serpent ad. A price tied to the number of the beast. And a founder whose ancestry traces back to the land of Eden.
“They didn’t hide the meaning. They embedded it in plain sight.”
The Apple That Never Existed
The Bible never says apple. It only says fruit.
“When the woman saw that the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband.”
Genesis 3:6 (Bible Gateway)
After eating, Adam and Eve sewed fig leaves together to cover themselves (Genesis 3:7). If they reached for fig leaves, it makes sense to wonder what kind of fruit hung above them.
Some ancient Jewish and early Christian writers believed it was likely a fig, but no one can know for certain (TheTorah.com, Chabad). What we can know is how the apple took over.
It started with language. In Latin, malum means apple, and malum also means evil (Rutgers University). When the Bible was translated into Latin, that pun locked in. Medieval Europeans, surrounded by apple trees, made the fruit of disobedience their own.
It was not revelation. It was convenience. A European fruit placed into a story born from African soil and the lands connected to it.
Once the image stuck, art did the rest. By the twelfth century, European artists were painting Eve handing Adam a bright red apple. That became the visual script repeated through centuries of stained glass, sculpture, and children’s Bibles. The repetition turned myth into memory.
“Bias becomes invisible when it’s built into the structure. It becomes normal.”
From Eden to Silicon Valley
The myth shaped language itself. The lump in the human throat is called the Adam’s apple, from the tale that a piece of the forbidden fruit lodged in Adam’s throat (Merriam-Webster).
When Jobs and Wozniak founded Apple, the name seemed friendly and simple. Yet the meaning carried weight. Designer Rob Janoff said he added the bite mark so “people would know it was an apple, not a cherry” (Creative Review). He later admitted, “It’s hard to avoid the symbolism. It’s the forbidden fruit” (CreativeBits).
The bite became byte. Knowledge became product. Technology became temptation. And once again, humanity reached for the fruit.
“You will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
Genesis 3:5
That same promise now glows from every Apple logo in homes, offices, and pockets across the world.
The Lie Hidden in the Image
The Bible never said it was an apple. The fruit was unnamed. The fig would make sense, but we cannot know. What we can trace is why Europeans chose the apple. It was a pun, a bias, and a way to make the story about themselves.
That shift turned a story born from the lands connected to Africa into a European myth about knowledge and sin. A simple word became one of the longest cultural edits in history.
So when a man descended from the region of Eden built a company named Apple, selling knowledge through a bitten fruit, the cycle completed itself. What began as scripture became marketing. What was once forbidden became profitable.
If the image of the apple was never truth, what else was rewritten to make Europe the center of the sacred story?
Because once you see the lie in the apple, you start seeing the serpent everywhere.
