Literary Titles Taken From the Bible

I discovered while studying literature as an undergraduate that many of the novels I was reading had titles taken from phrases in the Bible.

A list on goodreads.com of Book Titles Based on Lines from the Bible has several hundred possible titles. Here is some information on just a few.

The Sun Also Rises was a title that took Ernest Hemingway a while to select. The book was published in the UK in 1927 with the title Fiesta. After that, he decided on using a line from Ecclesiastes, which he also used as the novel's epigraph.

“What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun? One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever. The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose.”

Corinthians (13:12) provides the line “For now we see through a glass, darkly,” which has been used by several novelists, but it was also the inspiration for A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick, a novel about drug culture which was also made into a film by the same name.

Henry James used a Biblical reference for his novel The Golden Bowl which is also taken from Ecclesiastes (12:6): “…or the golden bowl be broken, …then shall the dust return to the earth as it was.”

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is a 1941 book. The words are by James Agee and the photographs are by Walker Evans. It documents the lives of impoverished tenant farmers during the Great Depression. The title is from a passage in the Wisdom of Sirach (44:1) that begins, "Let us now praise famous men, and our fathers that begat us".

The William Faulkner novel Absalom, Absalom! uses the Biblical story of Absalom, a son of David who rebelled against his father (then King of the Kingdom of Israel). Absalom was killed by one of David's generals, Joab, in violation of David's order to deal gently with his son. His death caused much heartbreak to David.

Faulkner also used a Bible reference from the Psalms for his title The Wild Palms. That book was later published under the title If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem and now is usually listed under both titles. Look at some of his other titles and you can see the influence: Light in August, and Go Down, Moses. 

East of Eden by John Steinbeck takes its title from the Bible's Land of Nod. This place mentioned in the Book of Genesis of the Hebrew Bible and is said to be located "on the east of Eden."It is the place where Cain was exiled by God after Cain had murdered his brother Abel.

Flannery O'Connor's novel The Violent Bear It Away  uses a verse from the translation in the Douay-Rheims Bible: "And from the days of John the Baptist until now, the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent bear it away" (Matthew 11:12).

Toni Morrison chose Song of Solomon as a title. Rather than being a verse from the Bible, it is a book of the Old Testament. The Song of Songs, also Song of Solomon or Canticles  is one of the scrolls) found in the last section of the Tanakh, known as the Ketuvim (or "Writings"), and a book of the Old Testament.

The Song of Songs is unique within the Hebrew bible as it shows no interest in Law or Covenant or Yahweh the God of Israel, nor does it teach or explore Wisdom like Proverbs or Ecclesiastes, but it celebrates sexual love, giving "the voices of two lovers, praising each other, yearning for each other, proffering invitations to enjoy."  In modern Judaism the Song is read on the Sabbath during the Passover, which marks the beginning of the grain harvest as well as commemorating the Exodus from Egypt. Jewish tradition reads it as an allegory of the relationship between God and Israel, and Christianity sees it as an allegory of Christ and his "bride", the Church.

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As always, if you have something to add to this post, comment below or email us.

Clockwork Orange

Probably best known as the title of Stanley Kubrick's 1971 film, A Clockwork Orange, the title began with a 1962 novel by Anthony Burgess.

In the novel, a clockwork orange refers to a person who "has the appearance of an organism lovely with colour and juice but is in fact only a clockwork toy to be wound up by God or the Devil or (since this is increasingly replacing both) the Almighty State."

The novel and film asks what is "goodness" and whether it makes sense to use aversion therapy to stop immoral behaviour. Director Stanley Kubrick, writing in Saturday Review, described the film as being "A social satire dealing with the question of whether behavioural psychology and psychological conditioning are dangerous new weapons for a totalitarian government to use to impose vast controls on its citizens and turn them into little more than robots."

A clockwork orange is a person who is robotic behaviorally, but one that is, in all other respects, human.

The novel was also adapted as A Clockwork Orange: A Play with Music in 1987 in a theatrical adaptation by Anthony Burgess.

Clockwork Orange was also the name of a supposed 1970s operation to discredit British politicians.

"Clockwork Orange" is a nickname for the Glasgow Subway in Glasgow, Scotland.

"Clockwork Orange" was a nickname for the Dutch national football team in the early 1970s.

Wendy Carlos's Complete Original Score

Titles in Literature

In this next installment of the origins of some book titles, we look at three classic pieces of literature.

Look Homeward, Angel is Thomas Wolfe's first novel.

Thomas' father, William Oliver Wolfe, use an angel statue as a porch advertisement at the family monument shop in Asheville, North Carolina. He sold the statue to a family who placed it in the Hendersonville Oakdale Cemetery. That statue, combined with a line from John Milton's poem "Lycidas" gave him his title.

"Look homeward Angel now, and melt with ruth:
And, O ye Dolphins, waft the hapless youth."

Wolfe's original title was The Building of a Wall, which he later changed to O Lost.  Good choice.


Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, the play by Edward Albee (and later a film) explained how he found his title in the bathroom of a saloon in Greenwich Village in 1954.

“I was in there having a beer one night, and I saw ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’ scrawled in soap, I suppose, on this mirror. When I started to write the play it cropped up in my mind again. And of course, who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf means who’s afraid of the big bad wolf... who’s afraid of living life without false illusions. And it did strike me as being a rather typical, university intellectual joke.”

John Steinbeck’s working title for a short novel was Something That Happened. But he changed his mind after reading Robert Burns’s poem “To a Mouse,” and latching onto the lines “The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men / Gang aft agley” (“The best-laid plans of mice and men / Often go awry”). The new title certainly gives us more about what Of Mice and Men is about.



James Joyce's Ulysses is one of those books you might be assigned to read, and it is on that list of "books you should read." And it is rarely read all the way through by most people who start it.

Books of 800 pages intimidated me as an English major and still do today. I struggle through it and wrote a paper about it. these many decades later, I recall very little of it. I do recall thinking "Why title it Ulysses?’" The name shows up a few times (once it is Ulysses Grant) but it hardly seems relevant.

Of course, I knew it might have something to do with that earlier un-Latinised Ulysses, Odysseus, the hero of Homer's Odyssey. I needed a professor to reveal that Joyce had used an intricate (and personal) allegory of the Odyssey to build his book in 18 episodes. Each had its own style and he gave them each an Odyssean name. But he didn't give readers the names in the text. The episodes are ‘Telemachus’, ‘Nestor’, ‘Proteus’, ‘Calypso’, ‘Lotus Eaters’ etc.  Joyce's Molly Bloom is like Penelope, and Stephen Dedalus is like Telemachus.

Book Titles

In our continuing series of posts about where titles of books and other works originated, we add these book titles.

The novel about colonialism in Africa,Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, takes its title from a W.B. Yeats’s poem, “The Second Coming.” to name his story about colonialism, pride, and loss:

“Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world...”

Flannery O’Connor's short story collection, Everything That Rises Must Converge  borrows from the book Omega Point by the French philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.

“Remain true to yourself, but move ever upward toward greater consciousness and greater love! At the summit you will find yourselves united with all those who, from every direction, have made the same ascent. For everything that rises must converge.”


Evelyn Waugh turned to T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Wasteland” for his book A Handful of Dust.

“I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.”

John Steinbeck often turned to the Bible for titles. His Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel The Grapes of Wrath  sounds like it might be Biblical. After several other working titles, his wife suggested a phrase from the song “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” by Julia Ward Howe.

“Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord:
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:
His truth is marching on.”

Bond. James Bond.

James Bond is the fictional protagonist of a series of novels and short stories by Ian Fleming. The first Bond story appeared in the 1953 novel Casino Royale. Most of Fleming's twelve novels and two collections of short stories have also been used for film adaptations with many retaining the titles of the novels.

Ian Fleming (28 May 1908 – 12 August 1964) came from a wealthy family, and was educated at Eton, Sandhurst and, briefly attended the universities of Munich and Geneva. While working for Britain's Naval Intelligence Division during WWII, he was involved in planning Operation Goldeneye and in the planning and oversight of two intelligence units, 30 Assault Unit and T-Force. All these aspects of his life are used in the Bond novels.

GoldenEye, the film, was released in 1995 and is the seventeenth James Bond film. It was the first to star Pierce Brosnan as 007 and also the first film in the series not to take story elements from the works of Fleming.

The Bond stories were written at Fleming's Jamaican home, named Goldeneye, and he generally published a book each year. Two of his books were published after his death in 1964.

Goldfinger is the seventh James Bond novel in the series and originally it was titled The Richest Man in the World. Perhaps, Fleming should have used that original title because his revised title used the name of someone he had known, Ernő Goldfinger, who threatened to sue over the use of his name. The matter was settled out of court and the title was used for the novel and the film version.


You Only Live Twice is the eleventh novel Ian Fleming published in the Bond series and is the last published in his lifetime. I am a Bond and a poetry fan, but I didn't know that these two interests ever crossed. That particular title got inspiration from the 17th-century Japanese poet Matsuo Basho. In the novel, 007 tries his hand at writing a haiku in the style of the Japanese master.

You only live twice:
Once when you are born
And once when you look death in the face

"A Diamond Is Forever" was (and might still be) a phrase used in advertising for the company De Beers and probably Fleming just tweaked it slightly for his novel Diamonds Are Forever.

"The World Is Not Enough" is believed to originate from Alexander the Great’s epitaph, and it is found in the 1963 Bond novel On Her Majesty’s Secret Service as being the family motto of Sir Thomas Bond. James Bond sees that coat of arms in the novel.

The phrase was used for a film of that name, but the plot of the novel On Her Majesty’s Secret Service became a film of its own. Sean Connery retired from the 007 role after You Only Live Twice and George Lazenby became Bond for only this one film in the series.


Not all of the Bond films are derived from Fleming novels or the novels' titles. A View To A Kill comes from an a non-Bond Fleming short story called "From A View To a Kill" and doesn't really make much sense plot-wise as a title for that film.

The second of the two Timothy Dalton Bond films is License to Kill. Having run out of novels to use, the filmmakers took elements from  two Fleming short stories, a novel, and some Japanese Rōnin tales. The working title for the film was a much more accurate one: License Revoked. In the film, M  suspends Bond and therefore his "license to kill." But after testing the "revoked" title, American audiences associated it with losing a driver's license, so the filmmakers went with the ironic (or just inaccurate) License to Kill.

Another oddball title in the series is Quantum of Solace. This 2008 film is named for a Fleming short story. Though a "quantum" is the smallest possible amount of a physical property, a small amount of solace have no real meaning in the film.

One inside joke became a film title.

In Never Say Never Again (1983), Sean Connery returned to playing James Bond for the seventh time. It was 12 years after Diamonds Are Forever when he "retired" from playing 007, and the film's title is a reference to Connery saying that he would never play Bond again. Now 52 years old, the plot was adapted so that Connery would be an aging Bond brought back into action.

The plot is a second adaption of Fleming's Thunderball novel which had already been filmed in 1965 with Connery.

Titles from Shakespeare

William Shakespeare has not only been credited as being the source of many words in English that he either coined or made popular, but he also is the source many writers have gone to for their own book titles.

His play Antony and Cleopatra gave Joyce Carol Oates her title New Heaven, New Earth. Eva Figes's Seven Ages and Francoise Sagan's Salad Days also used that play with phrases that entered the language.

Hamlet may be the most popular play for grabbing titles: Richard Matheson: What Dreams May Come; Edith Wharton: The Glimpses of the Moon; Peter Spence: To the Manor Born; Philip K. Dick: Time Out of Joint; Isaac Asimov: The Gods Themselves; Aldous Huxley: Mortal Coils; Graham Greene: The Name of Action.

David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest comes from Hamlet's speech: "Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy."

For his novel Brave New World, Aldous Huxley went to Shakespeare’s The Tempest.  In that play, the very naive Miranda who has lived her whole life on an island knowing only her father (the wizard Prospero) and some "spirits," meets men her own age for the first time when they are shipwrecked. Seeing them, Miranda says: "O, wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, That has such people in't!"

The popular young adult novel (and film), The Fault in Our Stars by John Green takes its title from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. The scheming Cassius says, “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”  Though cassius was referring to why their rank and power were below Caesar's, the novel is more on the idea that we should not blame fate for our state, but ourselves.

Pale Fire, a novel by Vladmir Nabokov, references the more obscure play Timon of Athens.
“The sun ’s a thief, and with his great attraction
Robs the vast sea; the moon ’s an arrant thief,
And her pale fire she snatches from the sun...”

Titles have also come from lines in Shakespeare's sonnets, such as Anthony Burgess' Nothing Like the Sun and Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past.

Book Titles

Authors often spend a lot of time trying to come up with a title for their writing. F. Scott Fitzgerald is a good example. Although he finally settled on The Great Gatsby, his notes and letters show that he had considered: Gatsby; Among Ash-Heaps and Millionaires; The World's Fair; Trimalchio; Trimalchio in West Egg; On the Road to West Egg; Under the Red, White, and Blue; Gold-Hatted Gatsby; and The High-Bouncing Lover.  Just before its publication, he said  “The title is only fair, rather bad than good."

I figure there are other stories of titles and came across a few to start that topic on this blog.

Baudelaire used the title Fleurs du Mal (Flowers of Evil) but its origin is not some clever allusion. Stuck without a title, he opened the naming to some friends while out a a cafe and Fleurs du Mal. An early example of crowdsourcing?

Now, to find some interesting title origin stories. Got one? Please leave a comment or email me.

Beetlejuice

Michael Keaton, as Beetlejuice, with Winona Ryder

I am a big fan of the film Beetlejuice and, like many films, its title has an origin story.

The name is a misspelling and mispronunciation of one of the sky’s most famous stars. The star is Betelgeuse and is often pronounced as “beetle juice” (which the film has certainly encouraged) but astronomers pronounce it as BET-el-jews.

The actual etymology of the star's name is a tangled one, but it certainly comes from Arabic origins, as do many other star names.

The star is sometimes described as "grandfatherly” because it appears in a reddish color to our eyes and that itself indicates that it is a star in its "autumn years."

By the way, I discovered that you can buy a copy of the Handbook For The Recently Deceased which is a book featured in the film.  It's a blank book, which is either a statement on the afterlife or a suggestion to write you own rules.

But back to Betelgeuse...

It is a rare red supergiant. So rare that it is said that there might be only one red supergiant star like Betelgeuse for every million or so stars in our Milky Way galaxy.  Red Antares is similar to Betelgeuse in that way.


This is a good time of year to look for Betelgeuse. It is part of the constellation Orion the Hunter. It is high in the night sky around 8 p.m. local time. As the night continues, and Earth turns eastward under the stars, Orion falls into the southwestern sky by late evening and then heads westward throughout the evening hours and finally plunges beneath the western horizon in the wee hours after midnight as Orion moves on his celestial hunt.

Betelgeuse forms Orion’s shoulder. You might also recognize some of Orion's other stars from films, TV and cultural references. Bellatrix is a star and an evil witching character from the Harry Potter novels and films.

The star Rigel has also been included in pop culture. Rigel-3 is a fictional planet in the Marvel Universe, homeland of the Rigellians. Rigel 4 is a fictional planet in The Simpsons , and Rigel 9 pops up in the lyrics of the opening theme music to Futurama: Into The Wild Green Yonder as a parody of Rigel 4.