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Japanese The Bible gives the knife no single symbol. Its knives are working tools: the knife Abraham carried up the mountain with Isaac, the flint knives of circumcision, the knives of the temple, a scribe’s penknife. For a larger meaning Scripture reaches for the sword, and the word of God is “sharper than any twoedged sword” (Hebrews 4:12).
The best-known knife in the Bible never cut anyone. “And Abraham stretched forth his hand, and took the knife to slay his son,” Genesis tells us, and at once “the angel of the Lord called unto him out of heaven” (Genesis 22:10–11). The angel called before he could use it, and a ram caught in a thicket was offered “in the stead of his son” (Genesis 22:13). The story of the knife in Scripture begins on that mountain, with a sacrifice God asked for and then provided himself.
Where are knives mentioned in the Bible?
These are the passages where a knife matters most in the King James Version. Each comes up again below.
- Genesis 22:6, 10: Abraham’s knife on the mountain with Isaac.
- Exodus 4:25 and Joshua 5:2–3: stone and flint blades for circumcision.
- 1 Kings 18:28: the prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel.
- Ezra 1:9: twenty-nine knives among the temple vessels.
- Proverbs 23:2 and 30:14: two proverbs about appetite.
- Jeremiah 36:23: the king’s penknife and Jeremiah’s scroll.
- Ezekiel 5:1: the prophet’s sign against Jerusalem.
Why did Abraham carry a knife up the mountain?
Because God had asked him for a burnt offering, and the knife was for the sacrifice. The Hebrew word is ma’akeleth, and Strong’s concordance traces it to the verb “to eat”: “something to eat with, i.e. a knife.” Isaac carried the wood, and Abraham “took the fire in his hand, and a knife; and they went both of them together” (Genesis 22:6).
On the way Isaac asked the question that hangs over the whole chapter: “Behold the fire and the wood: but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?” And Abraham answered, “My son, God will provide himself a lamb for a burnt offering” (Genesis 22:7–8). Then the angel said, “Lay not thine hand upon the lad” (Genesis 22:12), and Abraham named the place Jehovahjireh, the Lord will provide, as Jehovah Jireh explains. We read that mountain as a promise kept on another hill, where John the Baptist pointed to Jesus and said, “Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world” (John 1:29).
There is a quiet echo in the Greek. The Greek Old Testament calls Abraham’s knife a machaira, which Thayer’s lexicon defines as “a large knife, used for killing animals and cutting up flesh.” In the New Testament, Thayer adds, the word always means a sword, and it is the word used for Peter’s sword, for “the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God” (Ephesians 6:17), and for the “twoedged sword” of Hebrews 4:12. God’s word comes to us with an edge too, and Hebrews says what it cuts: it is “a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.”
What were flint knives used for in the Bible?
For circumcision. The men born during the forty years in the wilderness had never been circumcised, so God told Joshua, “Make thee sharp knives, and circumcise again the children of Israel the second time” (Joshua 5:2). The Hebrew says “knives of flint,” and its word for knife, chereb, is the word Scripture also uses for a sword. Long before, Zipporah had circumcised her son with a stone blade: she “took a sharp stone, and cut off the foreskin of her son” (Exodus 4:25).
Moses had already turned the blade toward the heart: “Circumcise therefore the foreskin of your heart, and be no more stiffnecked” (Deuteronomy 10:16). Paul tells believers that in Christ “ye are circumcised with the circumcision made without hands, in putting off the body of the sins of the flesh by the circumcision of Christ” (Colossians 2:11). Justin Martyr, the second-century Christian apologist, read Joshua’s flint knives as a picture of Christ’s words: “the knives of stone we shall take to mean His words.” The sign itself, and what each covenant made of it, is the subject of circumcision in the Bible.
Where else do knives cut in Scripture?
Proverbs uses the knife twice, and both times it is about hunger: our own hunger at a rich table, and a cruel generation’s hunger for the poor. Proverbs tells a guest at a ruler’s table, “When thou sittest to eat with a ruler, consider diligently what is before thee: And put a knife to thy throat, if thou be a man given to appetite” (Proverbs 23:1–2). Restrain your hunger as if your life depended on it. The other proverb pictures a cruel generation “whose teeth are as swords, and their jaw teeth as knives, to devour the poor from off the earth, and the needy from among men” (Proverbs 30:14).
On Mount Carmel the prophets of Baal “cut themselves after their manner with knives and lancets, till the blood gushed out upon them,” and all afternoon “there was neither voice, nor any to answer, nor any that regarded” (1 Kings 18:28–29). There the knives were turned on the worshippers themselves, and no god answered. And God told Ezekiel to shave his head and beard with “a sharp knife” and divide the hair in three, a sign of what the siege would bring: “This is Jerusalem” (Ezekiel 5:1, 5).
Who cut up Jeremiah’s scroll with a knife?
King Jehoiakim. He sat in his winter house beside the fire while Jehudi read him the scroll of Jeremiah’s prophecies. When Jehudi “had read three or four leaves, he cut it with the penknife, and cast it into the fire that was on the hearth” (Jeremiah 36:23), and the king went on until the whole scroll was burned. The Hebrew calls the blade the scribe’s knife.
Then “the word of the Lord came to Jeremiah, after that the king had burned the roll,” and it said, “Take thee again another roll, and write in it all the former words that were in the first roll” (Jeremiah 36:27–28). A knife could cut the scroll. It could not touch the word.
Did Jesus say anything about knives?
The Gospels never show him speaking of a knife. The blades of the New Testament are swords, and the most famous one was drawn to defend him. “Then Simon Peter having a sword drew it, and smote the high priest’s servant, and cut off his right ear. The servant’s name was Malchus” (John 18:10). Jesus would not be defended that way: “Put up thy sword into the sheath: the cup which my Father hath given me, shall I not drink it?” (John 18:11). He went up his own hill without a blade, the Lamb God provided.
What does a knife mean in a dream, or a broken knife?
Scripture gives neither one a meaning. No dream in the Bible has a knife in it, and nothing in Scripture treats a knife that breaks in the house as a sign. Christians bring a troubling dream to God and weigh it against his word, and dreaming about guns follows that through for dreams of weapons. A worry about a broken blade can go to him too, and be left there.
On that mountain Abraham took the knife, and God spoke first. The place still carries the promise in its name: “In the mount of the Lord it shall be seen” (Genesis 22:14).
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