Of Swords and Plowshares

My mind converged on a realization today as I was listening to music. The first thing I noticed was a line in the second verse of Don Henley's "End of the Innocence":

O’ beautiful, for spacious skies
But now those skies are threatening
They’re beating plowshares into swords
For this tired old man that we elected king
Armchair warriors often fail
And we’ve been poisoned by these fairy tales
The lawyers clean up all details
Since daddy had to lie

It's a beautiful song, with sad and poetic lyrics, but I recognized something today I never had before. I knew I'd heard plowshares and swords put together before. After about 2 seconds, I knew it what it was--Les Mis:

Do you hear the people sing
Lost in the valley of the night?
It is the music of a people
Who are climbing to the light.

For the wretched of the earth
There is a flame that never dies.
Even the darkest night will end
And the sun will rise.

They will live again in freedom
In the garden of the Lord.
They will walk behind the plough-share,
They will put away the sword.
The chain will be broken
And all men will have their reward.

My first thought was, "Wow! Don Henley knew Les Mis!" Then I realized how unlikely that was, so I wondered where else this idea came up. I googled it, and lo and behold, the concept is taken from a verse in Joel:

Beat your plowshares into swords
and your pruning hooks into spears.
Let the weakling say,
"I am strong!"

The search results turned up other uses of this verse (knowingly or not is not always easy to tell), including an essay about John Brown (the civil war-era abolitionist), a blogger's post about Russia's recent arms deal with Algeria, a politically-motivated inversion of the phrase by a Christian musician, a 1977 Time Magazine article about American farmers, a 1997 news article about Iraq's military build-up, and plenty of book titles.

Ooo, turns out Wikipedia has a useful entry on the phrase: "

"Swords to ploughshares" is a concept in which military weapons or technologies are converted for peaceful civilian applications. The plowshare is often used to symbolize creative tools that benefit mankind, as opposed to destructive tools of war, symbolized by the sword, a similar sharp metal tool with an arguably opposite use. The common expression "beat swords into plowshares" has been used by disparate social and political groups. The term's origin is a number of biblical quotes:

Wikipedia lists two other verses beside Joel that the concept is found in--two almost identical passages in Isaiah 2:4 and Micah 4:3 (hey, isn't it nice to read something from Micah besides "He has shown the..."?)

He will judge between the nations
and will settle disputes for many peoples.
They will beat their swords into plowshares
and their spears into pruning hooks.
Nation will not take up sword against nation,
nor will they train for war anymore.

I just skimmed through the first 10 pages of search results. Wow. I wonder how many other things that we don't even recognize give testimony to the profundity and ubiquitousness of the Scriptures in culture? Who would have thought a single thought process could take me from Don Henley and Les Mis to Iraq and the Scriptures!