In the Bible, the word "flesh" is often used simply as a description of the fleshy parts of an animal, including that of human beings, and typically in reference to dietary laws and sacrifice. Less often it is used as a metaphor for familial or kinship relations, and as a metaphor to describe sinful tendencies. A related turn of phrase identifies certain sins as "carnal" sins, from Latin , meaning "flesh."
Etymology
The wordflesh is translated from the Hebrew lexemes bāśār and šĕēr, and from the Greek σάρξ, and κρέας.
Meaning and Use
Old Testament
In the Hebrew Bible, the way of all flesh is a religious phrase that in its original sense meant death, the fate of all living things. This phrase does not appear verbatim in the King James Bible either, but is clearly prefigured in that translation: Samuel Butler, by contrast, used The Way of All Flesh as the title of a semi-autobiographical family saga, using the phrase to refer ambiguously to either the religious or to a sexual sense.
New Testament
makes this connection in Romans 7:18, in which he says: However, the Apostles' creed affirms 'carnis resurrectionem', the body being an essential part of a person. In religious language, the "flesh" took on specific connotations of sexual sins. It was in this sense that the nineteenth century critic Robert Buchanan condemned a Fleshly School of Poetry, accusing Swinburne, Rossetti, and Morris with preoccupation with sex and sensual matters. A traditional turn of phrase condemns "the world, the flesh, and the Devil" as the sources of temptation to sin. This specific phrase does not appear in the King JamesBible, but a similar sense appears in passages such as 1 John 2:16: The phrase definitely appears in the writings of Abelard, who writes that "there are three things that tempt us: the world, the flesh, and the devil." The litany of the 1662 edition of the Book of Common Prayer contains the petition: and the English translations of Roman Catholic litanies often contain a similar petition. This traditional turn of phrase gave rise to a number of films and books entitledThe world, the flesh, and the devil.
