Recently I was working through a thorny Biblical passage. What struck me as I surveyed the versions is how some expressions that entered English through translation have essentially shed their Biblical origin, as, for example, “eat, drink and be merry” (from Ecclesiastes 8:15) or “see eye to eye” (from Isaiah 52:8). But there are others—for example, “eye for an eye” (Matthew 5:38, alluding to Exodus 21:24) and “writing on the wall” (see Daniel 5)—that retain their scriptural setting among large swaths of readers. This is also true for single words that appeared in 15th- and 16th-century literature, like “beget,” […]
