DID YOU KNOW?
The answer
It's nowhere in the Bible. The line comes from a Persian fable retold in the West by the poet Edward FitzGerald in the 1800s, and Abraham Lincoln quoted it in a famous speech.
Why it’s interesting
Its cadence is so scriptural that it's read at funerals and quoted from pulpits — a folk proverb wearing biblical clothes. The Bible's nearest cousin is Ecclesiastes' "a time for everything," which says something rather different.
Scholarly consensus
You can know the Bible.
Not just the stories, but the history, authorship, and scholarship behind it.