The Skin of Your Teeth

Yea, young children despised me; I arose, and they spake against me.
All my inward friends abhorred me: and they whom I loved are turned against me.
My bone cleaveth to my skin and to my flesh, and I am escaped with the skin of my teeth.
Have pity upon me, have pity upon me, O ye my friends; for the hand of God hath touched me.

-- Job 18: 18-21 (KJV)

Job complains to three "friends" -- a pitiless bunch -- about his recent troubles, which have reduced him to skin and bones, and bad skin at that. He has only "escaped with the skin of his teeth" -- that is, his gums are about the only flesh he has left.

The phrasing is the work of the Geneva Bible translators (1560), who much improved on the earlier version by Miles Coverdale (1535): "My bone hangeth to my skin, and the flesh is away, only there is left me the skin about my teeth." The Geneva translation, besides being more elegant, is also more suggestive. Job not only has little flesh left "about" him, he has also escaped death by just the measure of that flesh. We now push the metaphor to its absurd limit, taking "the skin of your teeth" to mean the skin on your teeth (which is nonexistent), rather than the gums around them.

Such absurdity has made the phrase accommodating to humorists. Mark Twain, for example, noted with delicate contempt that "I made up my mind that if this man was not a liar he only missed it by the skin of his teeth" (Roughing It). On a darker note, Thornton Wilder used the line as the title of one of his plays, the upshot of which is that the human race has survived only by the skin of its teeth.

 
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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!