Biblical Reference of the Week

This semester I am reading the Hebrew Bible (known to many as the Old Testament).  A friend of mine and our mothers are reading the book looking at both its history and its literary influence.  We are not reading it in a religious or devotional way at all.

One of our regular assignments is to look for Biblical references that pop up around us in modern Western culture.  Here is one of the references I discovered this week:

In Howard Goodall's Big Bangs, a fantastic documentary about the development of western music, the host uses a reference to "forbidden fruit" while talking about the evolution of harmony into what became classical music.  He said that composers were quick to snatch the forbidden fruit of thirds and sixths--forbidden because they did not work neatly in the musical system that governed religious music (plain chant).  This, of course, is a reference to the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden of Eden.