Already Answered
ALREADY ANSWERED — THE BLOG SERIES
The questions keeping you up at night were asked three thousand years ago. They were answered, too.
Short essays that take a question people are actually asking and follow it back to the Wisdom Book that already answered it. Subscribe to get each new post as it goes up.
A Time for Everything
A man at a red light was singing it with the windows down. He was quoting Ecclesiastes in traffic, and he had no idea.
ALREADY ANSWERED · ALREADY QUOTED · No. 4
Where the saying comes from, and what the rest of the passage says
In May the Library of Congress added The Byrds' recording of "Turn! Turn! Turn!" to the National Recording Registry, which is the shelf this country keeps for recordings it does not intend to lose. The song went to number one in 1965. Almost every word of it is Scripture, and almost nobody noticed.
I was reminded of this at a red light a few weeks ago. The car beside me had its windows down and an oldies station on, and the man driving was singing every word of it, badly and with total commitment, the way people sing when they think the light is longer than it is. He was quoting the Book of Ecclesiastes in traffic.
This one has been on my list a long time. You knew it by heart. You never knew whose.
Pete Seeger wrote the song in 1959. He took it from the third chapter of Ecclesiastes, the first eight verses, and he did not adapt them so much as copy them out. Here is how the chapter opens in the Catholic Bible: "There is an appointed time for everything, and a time for every affair under the heavens."
What follows is the part everyone can hum, the long list of paired seasons. Though the most famous line in it is not quite what a Catholic reads today. The King James has "a time to be born," which is easier to sing and is the version three generations of us are carrying around. The rendering I read is blunter about who is doing the work: "A time to give birth, and a time to die."
The poem is also darker than the melody lets on, and Seeger did not soften it. The chapter makes room for killing, for hating, for tearing down, for war. He left all of it in, which means the song that became a peace anthem carries every violent line the chapter has.
So the question is not what Seeger cut. He cut almost nothing.
The question is what he added. Two things. The title, which is his. And one line at the very end, after the last pair, war and peace. The song closes on a promise that it is not too late. Six words, and apart from the title, the only ones in the song that nobody in the Bible wrote.
Here is what the chapter says instead, three verses past where the song stops. "God has made everything appropriate to its time, but has put the timeless into their hearts so they cannot find out, from beginning to end, the work which God has done."
Read that twice. There is a right time for every one of those seasons, and you can feel that there is, and you will not be shown the schedule. The ache to see the whole shape of your life was put there on purpose. So was your inability to see it.
What Ecclesiastes says is harder than what Seeger added, and I have come to think it is more useful. A promise like his can turn out to be wrong. It gets said at hospital beds and over caskets and it is sometimes simply not true. Ecclesiastes offers no guarantee about your timing. What it claims is that there is timing at all, that the seasons are not random noise. And it explains the restlessness: you cannot stop wanting to see the pattern because something put the wanting there.
I spent years certain I had missed my window. I was past forty when I came back, and I had done the math on what was left. What I had not noticed is that the chapter is not a promise about whether you still have time. It is a description of how time works for everybody, including the people who never left.
So the song is right that there is a season for everything. It is only wrong, and gently, about whether you get to see where you are standing in it.
If somebody sings this one in your car, you will have something to tell them at the next light.
Already quoted. Already answered.
Ecclesiastes is one of the seven Wisdom Books explored in The Original Search Engine. Learn more at solomongraybooks.com/the-book.
The overheard scenes in this series are figures, the way Job is a figure. See Post 0 for a note on the people in this series.
The verses are quoted from the New American Bible, Revised Edition (Ecclesiastes 3:1, 3:2, and 3:11).
Pride Goes Before a Fall
Two men in a checkout line said it about somebody from work. It is a real verse, and what people say is two halves of two different clauses, welded together.
ALREADY ANSWERED · ALREADY QUOTED · No. 3
Where the saying comes from, and what the rest of the passage says
The two men ahead of me in the checkout line were talking about somebody from work. I gathered he had spent most of the spring letting everyone know about a promotion that was coming, and that last week it had gone to somebody else. "Well," the older one said, working his card into the reader, "pride goes before a fall." The other one laughed and said that was about right.
He was quoting the Book of Proverbs. He was also quoting it the way nearly everyone does, which is to say not quite. And I am in no position to look down on him. I have used that line myself, in that same tone, about people who were not there to hear it.
This one is on my list. Sayings out of the seven books in the middle of the Bible, said every day by people with no idea they are quoting anything. You knew it by heart. You never knew whose.
The verse is Proverbs 16:18, more than two thousand years old, and here is the whole thing. "Pride goes before disaster, and a haughty spirit before a fall."
Now look at what we kept. We took "pride" off the front of the sentence and "before a fall" off the back, welded them together, and dropped everything in between. What people say is two halves of two different clauses. It is not a quotation. It is a splice.
The last saying I wrote about here came through two thousand years of handling almost word for word. This one did not. This one got cut apart on the way.
Then look at what fell out. Disaster. The King James, the translation most of these sayings traveled through, has "destruction" sitting in the same slot. Either way, that is the heavy word in the verse, and it is the one that did not survive the trip into everyday speech.
That swap matters more than it sounds like it should. A fall is a thing you get up from. It has a shape we enjoy: somebody gets too big, somebody trips, somebody learns something. There is a comeuppance in it, and comeuppance is satisfying, which is most of the reason the sentence is still alive in checkout lines. Disaster does not work that way. Disaster is not a lesson with a moral on the end of it. It is a wreck, and people do not always walk out of one.
Something else went missing in the splice. Hebrew poetry works by saying a thing twice, the second line answering the first. Pride and a haughty spirit are one trouble named twice. Disaster and a fall are one ending named twice, though not at the same volume. The saying took one word from each line, and it did not take them at random.
Here is the part I did not expect to find. The sentence is almost always aimed outward. It gets said about the neighbor, the boss, the candidate, the guy from work who would not stop talking about his promotion. That is its natural habitat, and I have put it there myself more than once. Proverbs does not use it that way. The book was written to be read by the person holding it. This verse sits in a long stretch of advice from a worried parent to a son. It was never a verdict to hand down. It was a warning to keep.
There is a reason aiming it outward comes so easily. In 1981 a Swedish psychologist named Ola Svenson asked two groups of students, one American and one Swedish, to rate their own driving against everyone else's. Ninety-three percent of the American group put themselves above average for skill. Eighty-eight percent placed themselves in the safer half. You cannot have eighty-eight percent of a group in that group's top half. The study was run again recently and it held. What it shows is not that some people are arrogant. It is that most of us rate ourselves higher than the math allows. Pride in the proverb's sense is not a personality type that other people have. It is closer to the setting we come installed with.
My own pride never looked like pride. The years I spent away from the Church were not a crisis and not an argument. I believed I already understood what was in there, and that showing up on Sunday would not add to it. Nobody would have called that arrogance, least of all me. It felt like being busy, and being sure. I was past forty before I opened the books that had my number, and this was one of the verses waiting in them.
Proverbs does not leave it at the warning, either. A few chapters earlier it says what to do instead: "When pride comes, disgrace comes; but with the humble is wisdom." Notice what the second half promises. Not humiliation, which is what the saying threatens and what we half enjoy watching. Wisdom, handed to the humble. That is what the whole book is chasing, and it turns out the door into it is something a person can choose on an ordinary Tuesday.
It is a better sentence than we made it. It is also a harder one.
If you pass this along, send it to somebody who likes knowing where words come from. Do not send it to the person you were thinking of.
Already quoted. Already answered.
The Book of Proverbs is one of the seven Wisdom Books explored in The Original Search Engine. Learn more at solomongraybooks.com/the-book.
The overheard scenes in this series are figures, the way Job is a figure. See Post 0 for a note on the people in this series.
Proverbs is quoted from the New American Bible, Revised Edition (Proverbs 16:18 and 11:2).
Nothing New Under the Sun
A man in a tire-shop waiting room said it at the news and went back to his phone. He was quoting one of the oldest books in the Bible, and it was never a shrug.
ALREADY ANSWERED · ALREADY QUOTED · No. 2
Where the saying comes from, and what the rest of the passage says
The waiting room at the tire place has a television bolted up in the corner, and nobody watches it on purpose. Thursday afternoon it was running the same story it had been running all week. A man in the chair across from me looked up at it for a second, said "Nothing new under the sun," to nobody in particular, and went back to his phone.
He was quoting the Bible. Not loosely, either. That sentence sits in there almost exactly as he said it, written by a man who was not making conversation. I did not think less of him for not knowing where it came from. I have said the same line in the same tone more times than I could count.
I keep a list. Phrases like that one, said by people who have no idea they are quoting anything, all of them out of the seven books in the middle of the Bible that this blog has been about from the beginning. You knew it by heart. You never knew whose. This is the second entry.
It comes from Ecclesiastes. The man who wrote it calls himself Qoheleth, which is less a name than a job description, something in the neighborhood of the Assembler or the Preacher. He is writing more than two thousand years ago, and he opens the book by taking inventory of everything a person can chase and reporting back that none of it holds. Then he says this: "What has been, that will be; what has been done, that will be done. Nothing is new under the sun!"
Read that last sentence again and notice how little has happened to it. Most of the phrases in this series came into English through the old translations and got worn smooth on the way, which is usually where the story is. This one is the exception. The King James has "there is no new thing under the sun," which is not how anybody says it now. The version we actually use is nearly word for word what a Catholic reads today. More than two thousand years of handling, and the sentence came through almost intact.
The words survived. The meaning did not.
We use it to close a subject. Somebody describes a scandal or a trend or an argument, and "nothing new under the sun" is the polite way of saying you have heard enough. It is a shrug with a pedigree. It means: this is not interesting, and I am not going to be surprised by it.
Qoheleth was not doing that. He was not bored. Two sentences later, in the same breath, he says what he actually meant: "There is no remembrance of past generations; nor will future generations be remembered by those who come after them."
That is the rest of it. He is not complaining that the world has run out of material. He is saying that everyone who came before has already been forgotten, and that the people coming after will forget you too. The sun keeps rising on the same story because there is nobody left who remembers the last time it happened. Now go back and read "nothing is new under the sun" with that attached to it. It is not weariness. It is a man looking straight at how short a life is and how fast the record of it closes.
He does not leave us there, and this is the part of Ecclesiastes that surprises people who only know its reputation for gloom. Having established that you will be forgotten, he does not tell you to build a monument. He does not tell you to make your mark, or to go find something that finally is new. He tells you to go have lunch.
"Go, eat your bread with joy and drink your wine with a merry heart, because it is now that God favors your works."
That is his answer to the fear of being erased, and it is not a consolation prize handed over at the end. It is the argument. If what you were counting on was being remembered, that was never going to hold your weight. What is left is the day you are actually standing in, the bread you are actually eating, and the God who, he says, favors the work of your hands right now. Ecclesiastes spends twelve chapters clearing away everything that cannot carry a life, and when he is finished the ordinary day is the thing still standing.
Psychologists came at half of this the long way around. In 1971 Philip Brickman and Donald Campbell described what they called the hedonic treadmill: people adjust to their circumstances, good ones and bad ones, and settle back toward a baseline, so the new thing stops feeling new and the chase starts over. Later researchers have argued the picture is more complicated than that, that baselines do move and not everyone returns to the same place, and I would not want to oversell a fifty-year-old idea. But the direction is the one Qoheleth was pointing. Novelty is a poor place to build. What the research does not supply, because that is not its job, is what to do instead. He had that part.
I had my own version of that shrug. Not in a waiting room, and not about the news, but the same reflex, and years of it. I never stopped believing. I stopped being curious, which is a quieter way to leave. Whatever they were going to say on Sunday, I was fairly sure I had heard it. Nothing new under the sun, in exactly that tone, aimed at seven books I had never actually read. I was past forty when I finally opened them and found out how much I had been certain of without ever checking.
So that is the second entry. A sentence people use to end conversations, written by a man who was not ending one. He meant it as the hardest thing he knew about being a person, and then he answered it with bread and wine and the afternoon in front of him, which is a stranger and a better answer than the shrug has any idea it is carrying.
You will probably still say it. I still do. You will just be saying more than you meant to.
If you know someone who says this one, and most of us know several, you could send it over without comment. The rest of the passage does the work.
Already quoted. Already answered.
Ecclesiastes is one of the seven Wisdom Books explored in The Original Search Engine. Learn more at solomongraybooks.com/the-book.
The overheard scenes in this series are figures, the way Job is a figure. See Post 0 for a note on the people in this series.
Qoheleth's words are quoted from the New American Bible, Revised Edition (Ecclesiastes 1:9, 1:11, and 9:7).
By the Skin of My Teeth
Where does "by the skin of my teeth" come from? The Book of Job, five verses before the line read at Catholic funerals. The first entry in the Already Quoted series.
ALREADY ANSWERED · ALREADY QUOTED · No. 1
Where the saying comes from, and what the rest of the passage says
Tuesday morning, two tables over, a young woman was on the phone with someone she loved. She had just gotten her nursing board results. "I passed," she said, and then, laughing, "barely. By the skin of my teeth." The person on the other end must have cheered, because she held the phone away from her ear and beamed at it.
She was quoting the Bible. One of the oldest poems in it, from a scene about as far from good news as literature gets. I would bet anything she did not know, and I do not say that as criticism. Almost nobody knows. That is the point of this new series.
For a while now I have been keeping a list. Phrases I hear in coffee shops and checkout lines and ballgame broadcasts that come straight out of the seven books in the middle of the Bible, the ones this blog has been about from the beginning, said by people who have no idea they are quoting anything. The list got long enough that I decided to start writing the entries down. You knew it by heart. You never knew whose. This is the first one.
"By the skin of my teeth" comes from the Book of Job. If you read the first series here, you know him. If you did not, three sentences will do. Job is a good man who loses everything: children, wealth, health, standing. His friends arrive to comfort him and spend most of the book explaining that he must have deserved it. By chapter 19 he has been arguing for a long time, and he is losing his body while he does it. His skin is failing him. His breath, he says, is repulsive to his own wife. And in the middle of cataloguing what is left, he says he has "escaped by the skin of my teeth."
The phrase walked into everyday English through the old translations, and it is still there, word for word, in the Catholic Bible on my shelf. But look at what it meant in his mouth. We use it for close calls. The flight we almost missed. The exam we almost failed. A narrow win, told later, with a laugh. Job was not telling a story about a near miss. He was saying that everything was gone and the only thing that had made it out was himself, barely, and not all of himself at that. The saying we use for our luckiest moments was coined at the bottom of a life.
Here is the part almost nobody has heard, and it is five verses away. Same chapter, same speech, same breath. Nothing improves in between. No rescue arrives, no friend softens, God has not said a word. Job asks that his words be written down, cut into rock forever, because he does not expect to live to be proven right. And then the man at the bottom says this: "I know that my vindicator lives, and that he will at last stand forth upon the dust."
If you have been to a Catholic funeral, you may have met that line without knowing where it lives. It is the reading we say over caskets. It is hope with its jaw set. And it comes out of the same mouth, in the same speech, as the skin of the teeth.
That order matters more than the etymology does. Most of us treat hope as the reward for rescue. First things improve, then you are allowed to hope again; anything earlier feels naive. Job runs the sequence backward. The boldest thing he says in the whole book, he says while still in the wreckage, before anything gets better. He does not even expect to live long enough to be proven right. The hope does not follow the turnaround. It precedes it. It is not the trophy. It is the thing said at the bottom that makes the bottom survivable.
Psychologists stumbled onto the same shape a few decades ago. Richard Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun gave it the name post-traumatic growth: the finding that people who come through the worst do not merely recover, but often report that something in them grew, and that the growth came out of the struggle itself, not out of the rescue. I want to be careful here, and Job would insist on it. Nobody owes anybody growth, and the bottom is not a gift. If someone you love is down there, do not hand them this paragraph as a silver lining. But it is worth knowing that the research and the old poem agree on the sequence. The hope that matters is not the kind you feel once you are out. It is the kind that gets said while you are still in.
I made the mistake in the other direction, the one I suspect is more common. For years I said these phrases myself, skin of my teeth included, while my faith was parked at Christmas and Easter. I never stopped believing. I just stopped going, and I was past forty before that changed. What strikes me now is that the vocabulary never left. The books I was not reading were still in my mouth the whole time. I have come to think of that as a door left open. Whatever else drifted, the words stayed within reach, waiting for me to find out whose they were.
So that is the first entry on the list. A phrase you have said after deadlines and traffic jams and board exams, coined by a man in ruins, five verses before the bravest sentence in his book. The next time it comes out of your mouth, you do not have to do anything with that. But you will know.
If someone you know just came through something by the skin of their teeth, you could pass this along. Not as a sermon. Just as the rest of what that sentence says.
Already quoted. Already answered.
The Book of Job is one of the seven Wisdom Books explored in The Original Search Engine. Learn more at solomongraybooks.com/the-book.
The overheard scenes in this series are figures, the way Job is a figure. See Post 0 for a note on the people in this series.
Job's words are quoted from the New American Bible, Revised Edition (Job 19:20 and 19:25).