The Bible in the News

“Do not cast your pearls before swine.” Although I am not sure exactly how we are to follow Jesus’

advice from the Sermon on the Mount recorded in Matthew 7, the editors, reporters and headline writers

of the popular press have no doubt about how they can apply this saying, or variations of it, to an extraordinarily wide

range of circumstances.

On rare occasions, the terms “pearls” and “swine” are taken literally. A brief how-to item in

Canada’s National Post is titled “Do Not Be the Swine Before Whom Your Pearls Are Cast”; it begins,

“Everyone knows that pearls are the accessory of choice these days” and continues with advice on how to care for

“those little bits of baubles.”

Arafura Pearls, selling at 20 cents (Australian) a share, is appraised as “one of the cheapest stocks we’ve

seen” in a business story that begins, “Is Arafura casting pearls before a market of swine?”

How about using “swine” literally, as in pigs? From Thailand we read of Somchai Nitikanchana, who put his

dreams of an engineering career on hold to “start a career as a pig farmer, taking care of all the family’s

swine.” This story’s title? “Pearls for Swine.”

The “pearls” and “swine” of today’s popular media are generally to be understood in a

nonliteral manner. Take, for example, this description of a young actor, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, appearing in a movie, titled

Brick, that earned four stars from London’s Times movie critic: “Gordon-Levitt has a Bogart-like

talent for one-liners cast like pearls before swine, ‘I got all of my five senses and I slept last night. That puts me

six up on the lot of you.’” This all seems rather far removed from the shores of the Sea of Galilee!

We are brought back to a Biblical context by lyrics recorded by Jason Collett—as reported in Australia’s

Courier Mail, which describes Collett as “one more Broken Social Scene maestro who’s produced another

great disc”: “It was a good place to be Judas/hiding pearls from the swine.” Although I have my doubts,

the paper’s critic speaks of Collett’s songs (presumably including this one, called “I’ll Bring the

Sun”) as possessing “captivating poetry.”

Elsewhere, “pearls before swine” is a staple of restaurant reviews, but rarely with the impact of this

otherwise subdued account (in The Washington Post) of New York’s 21 Club, where, in the old days,

“Writers Claire Boothe Luce and Dorothy Parker famously exchanged insults at the door (‘Age before beauty’

Luce announced. ‘Pearls before swine,’ Parker shot back.)”

This literary reference leads to our last two examples. Colin Falconer’s new novel is titled Pearls. A

reviewer in the Sydney Morning Herald notes that: “If Colin Falconer produces a sequel it will doubtless be

called Swine. Then, if he makes them both into movies in turn, he can tell his friends that he cast Pearls

before Swine.”

Whether wincing or laughing at that, most readers felt sadness at the death of Kurt Vonnegut in 2007. Few of us,

however, probably know that the full title of his 1965 novel was God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, or Pearls Before

Swine. Vonnegut’s title character sums up his philosophy of life with this line: “There’s only one

rule that I know of, babies—‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.’” Okay, it’s not

exactly the Golden Rule—but for our times, maybe it is!