I had heard the creation story growing up in Sunday school at my church. I remember coloring pictures of Adam and Eve eating an apple off an apple tree with a little snake on the ground. Even though it was never actually said in the Bible that the fruit was an apple, I had always grown up picturing that as what it was. Being confronted with the question of what kind of fruit was on the tree, I would have immediately said it was an apple. It just makes me wonder how many other things in the Bible I have consciously or subconsciously gotten mixed up or made assumptions about.
In our class discussion, we talked about how translations and their original language can have very big differences. We also talked about idioms and how difficult it can be to translate them because we have to have an understanding of cultural references. I hadn’t thought a lot about how things are translated and how the text that we are reading in English of the Bible can have a different meaning than the original language of the Bible. For example when I read “slept with” in the Bible I assume that the text is making a sexual metaphor. But we talked about how this phrase is also used to say that two people were buried together. It just serves to show us that we can make incorrect assumptions and interpretations of our own that aren’t what the text is actually saying.