The phrase the land of the living goes back to passages in the Bible like Psalm 52:5. Since at least the 1700s, this expression has been used to denote the realm of those still alive. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Land of the Living”
Have you ever welcomed a friend back after they’ve been working a whole lot or they’ve been sick for a while and you say, hey, welcome to the land of the living?
Yeah, they’ve just kind of appeared as if they’d been hidden in a cave for a while.
Yes.
Did you know that that’s a biblical expression?
Is it Lazarus or Jesus?
No, no. It goes all the way back to Hebrew scripture. There are phrases in the Bible from the Psalms and Isaiah where the phrase, the land of the living is used. Like for example, Psalm 52, 5, God shall likewise destroy thee forever. He shall take thee away and pluck thee out of thy dwelling place and root thee out of the land of the living.
And the expression has been used in English directly coming from that since at least the 1700s. Interesting. It’s so interwoven, all of the stuff from the Bible and Shakespeare and card games and gunslinging and gold rush days and baseball and like football.
There’s these things that we say if you have to think about them go, oh yeah, there’s a story.
Yeah, right. We’re carrying around this history in every word.
