It is not in the Bible, and for a stretch of years I was the man who said so. Somebody would offer it in a hallway and I would explain, kindly I thought, where it actually came from.
I stopped after I watched a woman use it on herself in a hospital corridor at two in the morning, over and over, like a handrail. She was gripping the one sentence she had to get from one hour to the next, and I had nothing better to hand her at that time of night.
It still is not in the Bible. The oldest versions belong to Persian poets of the twelfth century, and Solomon is not in them. Attar has a king who asks his wise men for a ring that will make him happy when he is sad, and they cut the sentence into one.
Solomon arrives later, and he is most of why it sounds like scripture, the way God helps those who help themselves sounds like Proverbs. He is in the Jewish folk versions, where the Hebrew runs gam zeh ya’avor, and in every English one. Walter Scott, writing to Lord Byron in 1813, told it as an Oriental tale of a sultan asking Solomon what to cut into a signet ring: a maxim fit for moderating the presumption of prosperity and tempering the pressure of adversity. FitzGerald printed the version that stuck in 1852, under the heading “Solomon’s Seal,” a seal because the thing was a ring.
Scott’s wording is the part worth keeping. The maxim was commissioned to work in both directions.
Half of it got dropped
Anything made to serve prosperity and adversity alike has to say two things at once. Your disaster is not permanent. Your good year is not permanent either.
The nineteenth century kept both halves. Lincoln put it to the farmers at the Wisconsin State Fair in 1859 and led with the hard edge: how chastening in the hour of pride, he said, and how consoling in the depths of affliction. Then he added that he hoped it was not quite true.
We say it only in the bad half now. Nobody says it at a wedding or in a delivery room. Said in one direction only, it becomes a promise that things return to normal. That is more than it was built for.
Isaiah keeps both edges
The voice said, Cry. And he said, What shall I cry? All flesh is grass, and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field: The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: because the spirit of the LORD bloweth upon it: surely the people is grass. The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand for ever.
Isaiah 40:6-8 (KJV)
Read what fades. All flesh, first, which takes in the person doing the reading. And then the goodliness, the flower, the thing at its best. Somebody is told to cry out, asks what he is supposed to say, and gets handed this. He names everything in the field before he names the one thing that outlasts it.
Peter quotes that passage to scattered churches under pressure and adds a line to it: “This is the word of Good News which was preached to you,” in 1 Peter 1:25, World English Bible. He offers them the one thing that was left standing when the field had gone.
Paul reverses the list
For our light affliction, which is for the moment, works for us more and more exceedingly an eternal weight of glory, while we don’t look at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen. For the things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal.
2 Corinthians 4:17-18 (WEB)
People reach for that verse as a version of the saying, and it nearly is, except that Paul sorts the world differently. Into the temporary column he puts the things which are seen, which takes in the house, the job and the healthy year along with the trouble.
He also says the affliction is doing work and not merely elapsing. Working for us, he writes, and the word does the labor. A thing that is working is not the same as a thing that is passing.
But two verses do say it
Two verses get raised against all this. Ecclesiastes 3 has a time for everything, and Psalm 30 has weeping lasting a night and joy coming with the morning. Both are in the Bible and both are true.
Neither one is a schedule. Ecclesiastes lists the seasons without telling you which one you are in or how long it runs, and three verses later the same writer says no man can find out the work God is doing from beginning to end. Psalm 30 is a man giving thanks after the fact, describing what happened to him and issuing no timetable to anybody else.
Some of it does not pass
The saying breaks here, and it breaks in the place where people most need it to hold.
Grief does not pass. It changes shape, it stops arriving every hour and starts arriving on certain dates, and a widower will tell you it is still there years later the way a filling is still there. Disability does not pass. Some illnesses do not. A dead person stays dead this side of the resurrection, and any sentence that quietly promises otherwise will be found out by the person holding it, usually alone, usually at night.
Scripture does carry a promise that the whole thing ends, in Revelation 21:4, where every tear gets wiped away. It is a real promise and not one about this week. Psalm 30 says weeping may last the night and joy comes in the morning, and I have watched that come true, and I have also watched people wait a great many mornings.
What I did not have that night
Isaiah does have something better, and it is harder to grip, which is why you want it in hand before you need it. The grass withers either way. He names the thing still standing when the field has gone.