No book in history has contributed more phrases to the English language than the King James Bible. Here are a few of the ways it has influenced everyday language.
Without unity there can be no strength In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus tells a crowd of impudent Pharisees, “Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and every city or house divided against itself shall not stand.” However, the phrase didn’t enter the modern lexicon until it was memorably quoted by Abraham Lincoln in his famous nomination acceptance speech of 1858. Addressing the contentious issue of slavery in the United States, he told an audience of Republican politicians that “a house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.” His words were prophetic. Three years later, the U.S. government did indeed split, and the resulting civil war between slave and free states cost more than 600,000 lives. The phrase meanwhile, became famous, immortalized as the title of a 1913 movie, a 1935 novel, and, rather grandiosely, an episode of the hit TV series Dallas. Not exactly what Jesus had in mind.
"By the skin of my teeth"
This is one of the many proverbs that owe their origin to the colorful language of the Book of Job. The tormented hero Job is complaining about his woes. He has become, he says, so emaciated that “my bone cleaveth to my skin and to my flesh, and I am escaped with the skin of my teeth.” The proverbial meaning is that he has missed death by a tiny margin—as narrow as the (non-existent) skin on a person’s teeth. But biblical scholars have argued endlessly about what the phrase originally signified. Some argue for a more literal interpretation: that Satan kept Job’s mouth—the skin of his gums, jaws, and lips—healthy in order to encourage him to blaspheme against God. More recently, the heavy metal band Megadeath put an interesting slant on the saying when they used it as the title for a track on their third album in 1992. Frontman Dave Mustaine explained to a live audience: “This is a song about how many times I tried to kill myself and just couldn’t get the job done.”
Stuck between the mighty pharaohs on one side, and a succession of great Mesopotamian empires on the other, Israel was always destined to be a small fish in a big and dangerous pond. By the middle of the sixth century BC, the Jewish kingdoms had been conquered repeatedly, and a decent chunk of the population was living in painful exile in Babylon. Amid all this geopolitical gloom, the Book of Isaiah had some words of comfort. Compared to God, says the prophet, “the nations are as a drop of a bucket, and are counted as the small dust of the balance.” These days, in keeping with the modern enthusiasm for “super-sizing,” the “bucket” is often replaced with the “ocean.”
"Fleshpot"
In the Book of Exodus, Moses leads the Hebrews out of Egypt to escape from the tyrannical pharaoh and find the Promised Land. They follow him eagerly enough at first, but it soon becomes clear that the journey will be far from straightforward. As geography students will remember, between Egypt and Israel lies the barren wasteland of the Sinai Desert. It isn’t long before Moses’ flock start complaining: “Would to God we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt,” they moan, “when we sat by the flesh pots, and when we did eat bread to the full.” “Flesh pots,” in this passage, means exactly what it sounds like: pots in which you cook flesh. But the fleshpots of Egypt became a popular metaphor for any luxurious scene imagined with regret or disapproval. Gradually, the Egyptian reference dropped away—in 1710, Jonathan Swift writes of the “fleshpots of Cavan Street”— until fleshpot became an all-purpose word for anywhere that was particularly alluring. These days a “fleshpot” can be anything from a casino in Las Vegas to a London nightclub.