A Two-Edged Sword

For the lips of a strange woman drop as an honeycomb, and her mouth is smoother than oil:
But her end is bitter as wormwood, sharp as a twoedged sword.
Her feet go down to death; her steps take hold on hell.
Lest thou shouldest ponder the path of life, her ways are moveable, that thou canst not know them.

-- Proverbs 5: 3-6 (KJV)

The "two-edged (or double-edged) sword" of Proverbs has very little to do with today's metaphor. A father is advising his son to resist the temptations of a loose woman, whose enticing words may sound sweet, but who will taste bitter in the end, truly "sharp as a two-edged sword" -- that is, really, really sharp.

But that's not what we mean. Today's "two-edged sword" is something that "cuts both ways" and is as harmful as helpful. The author (said to be Solomon), however, thinks a loose woman is only harmful and walks in only one direction: down the twisted path to sheol (translated "hell"), the Hebrew underworld. To take her apparent pleasures as the other "edge" is to misread the proverb.

Though this is the earliest passage in the Bible in which "two-edged sword" appears, the phrase was originally coined by William Tyndale in 1526 as he translated the New Testament epistles, specifically Hebrews 4: 12: "For the word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any twoedged sword." This is even less ambiguous than Proverbs.

Early figurative applications were more or less faithful to the biblical sense, but by the late seventeenth century the phrase was already on the path to distortion. The famous chemist Robert Boyle, in Some Considerations Touching the Style of Holy Scriptures (1661), referred for example to certain notions as "two-edg'd Weapons" that "are as well applicable to the service of Falsehood, as of Truth."

"Double-edged" is now commonly substituted for "two-edged," so it's even more false to the Bible. We owe the change, it seems, to John Dryden, who wrote in The Hind and the Panther (1687) of a "double-edged" sword that "cuts on either side." James Martineau virtually quoted Dryden verbatim in his Essays Philosophical and Theological (1866–1869): "The charge ... is double-edged, and cuts both ways." At least this piece of boilerplate has a distinguished history.

 
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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!