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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Scientist

There were scientists long before we had the word "scientist" to describe them. The word really doesn't appear until 1834,when it was coined from Latin scientia by the Rev. William Whewell, a Cambridge University historian and philosopher. He wrote it in the same paragraph in which he coined "physicist."

The word "science" was already in use having come from Middle English via Middle French back to Latin scientia meaning "knowledge" as equivalent to scient- (stem of sciēns), present participle of scīre to know + -ia .

A scientist was first seen as a kind of artiste, in the sense of one who cultivates one of the arts presided over by the Muses (history, poetry, comedy, tragedy, music, dancing, astronomy. By the 17th century, it was also used for "one skilled in any art or craft" which would have included professors, surgeons, craftsmen, cooks etc. ). Since mid-18c. especially of "one who practices the arts of design or visual arts."

Aristotle was described as a natural philosopher.
Was he a scientist?

In 1840, Whewell said that Leonardo da Vinci was mentally a seeker after truth and so he was a scientist. Whewell was the master of Trinity College at Cambridge and a fairly good scientist himself in writing about geology, oceanic tides, and mathematics.

At the time, he was friends with scientists of the day such as Faraday and Darwin. Whewell was one of the Cambridge dons whom Charles Darwin met during his education there, and when Darwin returned from the Beagle voyage he was directly influenced by Whewell, who persuaded Darwin to become secretary of the Geological Society of London. The title pages of On the Origin of Species open with a quotation from Whewell's Bridgewater Treatise about science founded on a natural theology of a creator establishing laws:

"But with regard to the material world, we can at least go so far as this—we can perceive that events are brought about not by insulated interpositions of Divine power, exerted in each particular case, but by the establishment of general laws."

Michael Faraday is best known for his study of electromagnetism and electrochemistry. He is responsible for discovering the laws of electrolysis, and for popularizing terminology such as anode, cathode, electrode, and ion - all terms proposed in large part by William Whewell.

Whewell was writing a book, The Philosophy of the Inductive Science, which helped lay out basic questions in science like: How do you come up with a hypothesis? How do you prove it? Should it be universal?

Jackknife

One thing that comes to mind - perhaps first for people these days - is when you hear the word "jackknife" is a wrecked big rig on the highway with the tractor wedged against the trailer at a 45-90 degree angle.

This term is a reference to the folding pocket knife (larger than a "pen knife") once known as the jackknife whose blade can be folded back into its handle. Visually, this folding resembles a jackknifed truck and trailer.

The name "jackknife" comes from the heyday of seafaring. Sailors commonly carried these tools and they were associated with sailors. Because of its link to the Mariners who carried them the night became known as the jackknife which etymologists believe is a reference to a sailing vessel's flag or Jack staff.

The use of jackknife as a verb (sometimes jack-knife) goes back to American English in the Revolutionary War days when it took on the meaning "to stab." Around the time of the Civil War, it also had the meaning of "to fold or bend" your body as with the knife.

Starting around 1922, it started being used to describe a kind of swimming dive.

It didn't become something used to describe truck accidents until the second half of the 20th century. 

3 divers, the topmost one doing a jackknife