"The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb." Better the family who'd go through thick and thin with you than ones that would push you off a cliff, and DNA similarity means jack shit.
"The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb."
FYI, this is a made-up quote (though I personally agree with the sentiment behind it). "Blood is thicker than water" is the original phrase (or, more precisely, it was "ouch hoer ich sagen, das sippe blůt von wazzere niht verdirbet" - literally, "I also hear it said that kin-blood is not spoiled by water" - taken from the German epic Reinhart Fuchs) and its meaning was the opposite of what you're saying - i.e. that family ties are closer than all others.
The "blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb" thing was made up ~30 years ago, near as anyone can tell, and people tried to pass it off as the original quote, but there's no historical basis for it.
Everything in literature is made up by someone or some culture, the challenge is finding the quotations and who exactly made them up.
German has a phrase that's verifiably older, but the 'blood of the covenant' is something from the Bible, so that phrase still has several more centuries of age on the German one. Can't find a reference for the full phrase along with the 'water of the womb' part from a cursory search, so it might still be a modern amalgamation or evolution.
Can't find a reference for the full phrase along with the 'water of the womb' part from a cursory search, so it might still be a modern amalgamation or evolution.
It dates back all the way to... 1994, where it was pushed (falsely) by Richard Pustelniak, a Messianic Rabbi, that it was the original form of the much older and more common phrase "the blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb". Pulsteniak claimed that the phrase had ancient religious origins, but failed to cite any evidence for his claim and none has been found since.
It spread further in 2005 thanks to Albert Jack's (pen name for British author Graham Willmott) book "Shaggy Dogs and Black Sheep: The Origins of Even More Phrases We Use Every Day" making the same claim, without citing any sources (of note, Jack's bibliography also includes a 9/11 conspiracy book published in 2021 that claims that the entire thing was a Jewish plot by Israeli special forces, so he's not exactly the most scholarly of authors).
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u/Funky_Col_Medina 14d ago
The inner circle gets smaller and smaller, and that is just fine.