the tradition of all the
scriptures and religious texts created by man, the Bible too is a
rich source of allusive language, yielding expressions that carry the
weight of centuries of meaning in multiple layers. ‘The writing on the
wall’ owes its origin to the Bible. The King of Babylon,
Belshazzar, gave a great banquet for a thousand of his lords. During the
merrymaking, they all drank from goblets taken from the temple and
praised the gods of gold, silver and other materials. Suddenly, the
fingers of a hand appeared and wrote on the wall ‘Mene, mene, tekel,
upharsin’. Daniel translated the words for the king, explaining to him
that the words announced that his reign was over, he had been assessed
and found wanting and would soon lose his kingdom. The same happened and
since then, the writing on the wall is a herald of doom.
‘A golden
calf’ is something unworthy that is excessively esteemed, especially
money. It comes from the biblical story in which Moses came down from
Mount Sinai carrying the stone tablets with the Ten Commandments only to
find the Israelites worshipping a calf made of gold.
An inexhaustible
supply of something that appears meagre is ‘a widow’s cruse’, from
the biblical story of the widow’s jug of oil that miraculously
replenished itself to supply Elijah during a famine. A cruse is a small
earthen pot for holding liquids. Reminds one of so many similar stories
in the Indian scriptures, driving home the truth that human experience
and culture remain the same, only the outer garb changes.
‘Widow’s
mite’ refers to a small contribution happily given by one who can
hardly afford it. In the story, Jesus observes people casting money into
the treasury. While many rich gave much, a widow contributed two mites,
all she had. A mite is a coin of very small value.
An onerous burden or
affliction that causes a lot of suffering is termed ‘a crown of thorns’.
The original crown of thorns was the mock crown made of thorny branches
that Roman soldiers placed on Jesus’ head before his crucifixion.
