The Way of All Flesh

And, behold, this day I am going the way of all the earth: and ye know in all your hearts and in all your souls, that not one thing hath failed of all the good things which the Lord your God spake concerning you; all are come to pass unto you, and not one thing hath failed thereof.

-- Joshua 23: 14 (KJV)

For once, the Authorized Version loses. "The way of all the earth," its translation of Joshua's phrase, is much less popular than "the way of all flesh," which comes from the English Catholic Bible of 1609, by way of various medieval texts.

Either way you like it, what the aged Joshua means is that he must die, and this is his swan song. But over the years his words came to mean something else altogether. Perhaps influenced by Jesus' saying, "The spirit indeed is willing but the flesh is weak" (Matthew 26: 41), pious Englishmen began using the present phrase to mean "the way the flesh desires," which wasn't thought terribly godly.

An early example is to be found in the play Westward Ho! (1605) by Shakespeare's contemporaries Thomas Dekker and John Webster. "I saw him even now going the way of all flesh," says Mistress Birdlime, explaining, "(that's to say) towards the kitchen." By 1668 the phrase was used to allude to sex, following in "fleshpot's" footsteps. In any case, it would rarely be used thereafter to mean "to die"; Joseph Conrad didn't mean to contradict himself when he wrote in The Rescue (1921) that "His flesh had gone the way of all flesh, his spirit had sunk in the turmoil of his past, but his immense and bony frame survived as if made of iron."

 
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Michael Macrone is Associate Site Producer of GraceCom and the author of nine books on language, literature, and ideas, including the best-selling Brush Up Your Shakespeare!