Anyone wishing to compile a list of Hungarian proverbs will immediately be confronted
with the
difficulty of the task. Proverbs of biblical origin such as An eye for an eye, a tooth
for a tooth;
Stretch as far as your legs will take you; He who seeks, (he) shall find; No one can
be a prophet in
his own country and many other proverbs from the Bible are very popular in Hungary,
but are not of
Hungarian origin. The biblical proverbs have become established in countless other
languages and
are one of the most widespread groups of proverbs today.
In this paper, I first discussed the development of biblical proverbs into proverbs,
with a special
focus on the most popular biblical proverbs from my empirical research in the 1990s.
I then presented
the transgression of proverbs of biblical origin (i.e. antiproverbs). Certain biblical
proverbs are particularly prone to being misrepresented. First, I described the most
commonly distorted biblical
proverbs and analysed antiproverbs that have several variants or are found in several
sources.
In the second part of my study, I presented the use of the biblical proverb An eye
for an eye, a
tooth for a tooth in the works of Hungarian writers and publicists. Why did I select
this proverb? The
most important reason for choosing the proverb is that in the database of more than
10,000 examples
of its occurrence collected over more than two decades, this proverb has become the
absolute gold
medallist, i.e. it has the most examples of its use. The proverb An eye for an eye,
a tooth for a tooth,
like many other proverbs of biblical origin, can be found in both the Old and the
New Testament. The
occurrence of this popular biblical proverb in the various books of the Bible, as
well as its meaning
and structure, have been discussed separately.
What exactly is going on in the minds of Hungarian authors (both classical writers
and publicists)
when they use this biblical proverb? The ways in which this proverb is embedded in
a text can be
extremely varied. I have presented the varied uses of the proverb in Hungarian fiction
and newspapers,
touching on the cases where the proverb has been transformed into an anti-proverb.
I have examined
several proverb parodies in detail.
