By the Skin of My Teeth

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.

◆   ◆   ◆

We say it laughing. He said it dying.

◆   ◆   ◆

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).