Is "This Too Shall Pass" in the Bible?

Four words that sound like Scripture

Someone is going through it. A diagnosis, a layoff, a marriage coming apart. And a well meaning friend says the words, usually with a hand on the shoulder: this too shall pass.

It is meant kindly. It is also not in the Bible, and the difference between what it says and what Scripture says about suffering is not small.

Where does the phrase actually come from?

Persia, and not from any Jewish or Christian source.

The saying is traced to the medieval Persian Sufi poets, Attar of Nishapur among them. The version most people know is a fable. A king asks his wise men for something that will make him happy when he is sad and sober when he is proud. They bring him a ring engraved with a single line: this too shall pass. It works in both directions, which is the point of the story and the part that usually gets dropped.

English readers met it through the poet Edward FitzGerald, who published a retelling called "Solomon's Seal" in 1852. In FitzGerald's version a sultan asks Solomon for a motto that would hold in adversity and in prosperity alike, and Solomon gives him "this also shall pass away." That attachment to Solomon is almost certainly why people assume it is biblical. FitzGerald put a biblical name on a Persian story, and the name stuck while the sourcing did not.

Abraham Lincoln used it in an address to the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society on 30 September 1859, which is roughly when it became common American speech.

So: a Persian fable, an English poet, an American president. No prophets, no apostles.

Why does it feel biblical anyway?

Because Scripture genuinely does talk about the transience of things, and often.

"All flesh is like grass and all its glory like the flower of grass. The grass withers, and the flower falls" (1 Peter 1:24). Ecclesiastes circles the same ground for twelve chapters. The Psalms return again and again to how short a life is. If you have read much of the Bible, the mood of "this too shall pass" is familiar.

The mood is familiar. The claim is not.

What does the Bible say instead?

Here is Paul, writing to a church that was watching him suffer and wondering what it meant.

"For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal" (2 Corinthians 4:17-18).

Read that carefully, because it is doing something the proverb never does. Paul agrees that the affliction is temporary. He says so plainly. But temporary is not his main verb. His main verb is preparing. The suffering is not just a thing you outlast. It is doing work. It is producing something that will still exist when the suffering does not.

That is a different claim about the same experience. "This too shall pass" treats time as an anesthetic: hold on, and eventually you will stop feeling it. Paul treats affliction as productive: hold on, because something is being made.

Notice also who is speaking. Paul wrote that as a man who had been beaten with rods, stoned, shipwrecked and imprisoned. He is not offering a coping slogan from a comfortable chair.

Does that make the proverb wrong to say?

Not wrong, exactly. Thin.

There is nothing false in it. Seasons do end. Saying so to a friend at 2am is not a sin, and there are moments when "you will not always feel this" is genuinely the most useful true thing available.

The trouble is when it becomes the whole theology of suffering, which for a lot of people it has. Endurance with no purpose attached is Stoicism. It is a respectable philosophy and it is not the Christian one. Christianity does not say your pain is meaningless but brief. It says your pain is real, God is present in it, and it is not being wasted.

Those two positions feel similar right up until the moment when a season does not pass. Some do not. Some conditions are permanent this side of the resurrection. A proverb that only works if the trouble ends will fail exactly the people who need it most, and Paul's sentence will not, because his hope was never that the affliction would stop first.

What should you say instead?

Something with an address on it.

Romans 8:18, that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory to be revealed. Psalm 34:18, that the Lord is near to the brokenhearted. 2 Corinthians 1:3-4, that God comforts us in our affliction so that we can comfort others in theirs. Any of these can be looked up, read in context, and sat with. A proverb cannot be sat with. There is nothing under it.

That is the practical difference between a saying and a text. One gives you a line. The other gives you somewhere to go.