The World of Apples

The apples that aren't

Apple of Sodom

Calotropis procera, Apocynaceae

Josephus, describing the Dead Sea in his history of the Jewish war, wrote that where Sodom had burned there were still “ashes growing in their fruits”: fruits that look fit to eat, “but if you pluck them with your hands, they dissolve into smoke, and ashes”3.

Seetzen, Irby, Mangles and others, and above all Robinson in his Biblical Researches in Palestine, identified them with the fruit of the ‘osher, as the Arabs called Asclepias procera, which in Palestine grew only by the Dead Sea4; botanists now call it Calotropis procera2. Robinson found the fruit like “a large, smooth apple, or orange”, yellow when ripe, which when pressed “explodes with a puff, like a bladder or puff-ball”, leaving shreds of rind and a little fine silk that the Arabs twisted into matches for their guns4.

Kew gives the plant’s native range as Macaronesia and northern and tropical Africa to Indochina2. In Israel it grows mainly around Ein Gedi, and Hebrew calls it tapúakh sdom, the apple of Sodom5.

Where the sources disagree

  • Which plant. The name has been given to several. Besides Calotropis, Wiktionary lists the bitter apple and nightshades such as Solanum linnaeanum, the devil’s apple of southern Africa6.

Sources

  1. GBIF Backbone Taxonomy: Calotropis procera, Global Biodiversity Information Facility. Supports: the accepted name and family.
  2. Plants of the World Online: Calotropis procera, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Supports: the accepted name, with Asclepias procera as its synonym; the native range, "Macaronesia, N. & Trop. Africa to Indo-China".
  3. Of the War, book 4, chapter 8, Flavius Josephus, translated by William Whiston (1737), University of Chicago. Supports: the fruits near Sodom that look fit to eat but "dissolve into smoke, and ashes" when plucked.
  4. Apple of Sodom, Cyrus Adler and Kaufmann Kohler, The Jewish Encyclopedia. Supports: the identification by Seetzen, Irby, Mangles, Robinson and others with the fruit of Asclepias procera, the Arabs' osher, confined in Palestine to the shores of the Dead Sea; Robinson's description of the fruit.
  5. פתילת המדבר הגדולה, Hebrew Wikipedia. Supports: the Hebrew name tapúakh sdom; the plant in Israel mainly around Ein Gedi.
  6. apple of Sodom, Wiktionary. Supports: the plants given the name: Calotropis procera, the colocynth, and nightshades including Solanum linnaeanum, the devil's apple of southern Africa.