I went on a quick google search for the origin of “This too shall pass” and quickly found the story of Solomon. However one part of the story confuses me, namely
I really have no grasp of a language other than english, so I don’t quite understand this bit. To me it sounds like Benaiah is seeing T— T-- S---- P— and knowing it says This Too Shall Pass. That or he is seeing “This” spelt out as T-H-I-S and then reading the whole inscription.
Can someone explain how this works to an english layman? Also for interest sake, how is This Too Shall pass translated back into the hebrew alphabet?
Well, I can’t put it into Hebrew for you, but I read it as an initialism. That is, GZY = “Gam zeh ya’avor”, the same way we write IIRC here to mean “if I recall correctly” and WWJD means “What would Jesus do?”
Although, I feel as though I may be missing something, because that seems like too obvious an answer.
Exactly. Gam Ze Ya’avoris Hebrew for “This Too Shall Pass”, and Gimel, ayin, Yod would be “GZY”, or the equivalent Hebrew acronym for the words.
However, the phrase Gam Ze Ya’avor strikes me as excessively “modern” Hebrew to be found in really old sources – I’ll have to check out yoiur articles, but it doesn’t sound like Biblical Hebrew to me. But that’s a different question already.
On reading the story link, it definitely looks like a modern rendition of a (possibly) older story. Your link is to a site that doesn’t even try to ascribe the story to any previous source, so I really don’t know. Quite possibly somebody (re-?)translated “This too shall pass” into Hebrew and build this little tidbit around it.
The fact that GZY would be a good acronym for “Gam Ze Ya’avor” stands, however. Whether the story is ancient or not.