Common Sayings Rooted in the Bible by Myra Kahn Adams for Town Hall
Thanks for joining us today as we study common sayings that originated from the Bible unbeknownst to most people. But the good news is that reading the Bible is trending upward according to the American Bible Society’s 11th annual “State of the Bible.”
The Society reports that “millions more Americans turned to the Bible in the past year than in previous years.” Perhaps it was pandemic related when “one in four U.S. adults report a more frequent Bible reading habit than did last year.”
Maybe that “habit” will continue considering the Bible is still the world’s all-time best-selling book with 5 billion copies sold. A distant second is “Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung,” at 1.1 billion copies, followed by the Quran with 800 million.
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That completes the Bible news and trivia portion of this study. Now let’s turn our attention to sayings rooted in Scripture.
Three weeks ago, in Vol. 64, we thoroughly examined the biblical origin of the “good Samaritan.” However, today, we only skim the surface of many more since this is a “quick” Bible study. But a link to the original verse encourages you to dive deeper into the context of each phrase.
We start with the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible — the name preferred by those of my heritage.
“Handwriting on the wall” foreshadows an adverse event in the making. Verse: “Suddenly the fingers of a human hand appeared and wrote on the plaster of the wall, near the lampstand in the royal palace. The king watched the hand as it wrote” (Daniel 5:5).
“Drop in the bucket” describes something small or insignificant compared to the enormity of the matter or unfinished task at hand. Verse: “Surely the nations are like a drop in a bucket; they are regarded as dust on the scales; he weighs the islands as though they were fine dust” (Isaiah 40:15).
