How many biblical verses have become proverbs or idioms?
You may want to know how I got the idea to ask this question. If you don’t want to know, then that’s too bad.
“To protect themselves against bias, good scientists adopt procedural safeguards against errors, especially errors that could work in their favor (see Chapter 2). In other words, scientific methods are tools for overcoming confirmation bias: the tendency to seek out evidence that supports our beliefs and deny, dismiss, or distort evidence that contradicts them. (Nickerson, 1998; Risen & Gilovich, 2007). We can sum up confirmation bias in five words: seek and ye shall find.”
The authors of the quote seem to love to use citations in almost EVERY PARAGRAPH of the book. So, the awkward citation right there is normal.
Anyway, I recognized the quote from somewhere, but I couldn’t remember exactly where. So, I searched online on Google, my favorite search engine in the whole wide world, and found the answer. It’s a biblical idiom. Cool.
How many biblical verses have become proverbs anyway?
I don’t think your question can have a definitive answer; for one thing, what counts as a “proverb”? I suppose one could look in a book of quotations and see how many entries it has from the Bible; but I wouldn’t expect such a list to be anywhere near complete.
Heck, even the Bible itself contains numerous quotations and references from elsewhere in the Bible.
I think this question is best answered in the IMHO section. Basically, I expected that you would list all the proverbs that you remember (without looking) that just happens to be recorded in the Bible.
I asked the mods to move it then, just in case you hadn’t. Though I wonder if Cafe Society wouldn;t work as well–you are treating the Bible as literature in this context.
Is the question limited to English? Because if it’s not, and given how many languages has the Bible been translated to and how many countries have or had a majority of their populations follow one of the three Biblical religions, you have to take that buttload njtt estimated and elevate it to a four-figure number…
I just finished reading Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, and in the closing pages he lists a collection of common expressions – many of them proverbs and idioms – that come from the King James Bible (It’s an nillustration of why even atheists ought to be familiar with the Bible). The list isn’t in any order, and it isn’t one saying per line. They’re all mashed together, and give the impression of an improptu off-the-top-of-his-head rcollection, and it goes on for over a page.
Curiously, he includes “Spare the rod and spoil the child”, which is NOT in the Bible, at least not in that form* I’m not surprised at the list. I’m sure that I could dash off one as long.As Dawkins suggests, an awful lot of common expressions have been used so long that most people wouldn’t even recognize them as Biblical expressions.
My complaint has always been about the Book of Proverbs. we get surprisingly few of our Proverbs from this book. Most of the entries aren’t even what we would think of as proverbs – short, well-expressed statements with characteristic and often non-obvious wisdom, easily remembered and quoted. An awful lot of the entries in the BoP are long-winded, eminently non-quotable, and the point isn’t very clear. Often the author simply seems to be amazed at something or confused by it – which isn’t really a good subject for a proverb.
Is that the origin of the line, or a phrase with a different origin which got used in English-language Bibles? The Spanish versions speak of la niña de tus ojos, which is the Spanish-language equivalent idiom, but its literal translation to English would be “the she-child of your eyes” - so my WAG is that you’ve actually got the second case, i.e., a wise translator and not an idiom which originated with the Bible.
As Nava has said, that’s true for other languages, too. My rule of thumb is “a quote or idiom in English is either from the Bible or from Shakespeare; in German, it’s either from the (Luther) Bibel or from Goethe (including Schiller)”
That’s because Luther using a dialect from the middle of Germany for his translation, plus “den Leuten aufs Maul schauen” (looking at the common’s people yaw to learn how they talked, instead of using the language of higher learning and staying close to the text), plus the wide-spread of his translation because of the incidience with printing by Gutenberg, all lead to the German of Luther’s Bible forming the basis for Standard High German.
Do you mean proverbs in the sense of “providing advice” like "he who digs a pit for others will fall into it himself (Proverbs 26, 27)
or do you mean "commonly used phrases like “casting pearls before the swine”, where most people don’t know where they come from but use them because they are apt for the situation?