A Bit of Wisdom
I don't recall that anyone ever gave me a horse. If it did happen, however, I wonder if I was polite enough to remember the medieval proverb, "No man ought to looke a geuen hors in the mouth." I doubt that many people have actually looked a gift horse in the mouth. Nobody in my family, I'm pretty sure. Nor among my friends; I made inquiries.
This is unfortunate, perhaps, because the inside of a horse's mouth provides a very interesting and profitable study. The equine teeth, like ours, are divided between biting teeth and chewing teeth, but these two types are arranged quite differently from our own. Between the horse's front teeth (incisors) and its back teeth (molars) there is a large gap, called the "bars," a space of several inches in which there are no teeth.
Now as for the famous rule about gift horses, it has not been uniformly enforced, I think. For instance, sometime in the late second millennium before Christ, there must have been a very smart kid who was given a horse, perhaps as a birthday present. Later on, when he imagined nobody was watching, the boy sneaked a peek into the gift horse's mouth, where he took note of the forementioned interdental gap. Sharp lad that he was, he also spotted an opportunity.
One speculates that the boy may have received the gift horse as a reward for his high grades in physics. It is clear, anyway, that in addition to being curious, he was also inventive. After studying the animal's dental pattern, he designed a sort of bar (probably wood or hide, at first), which he inserted crossways through the empty space; he made it to extend out both sides of the mouth, attaching each end to a bridle and reins. Thus, the rider, by pulling and adjusting the reins, could better control the horse's direction and speed. Eventually, somebody thought to call his invention a "bit."
I admit that this account does not actually appear in the Bible. The horse was not, after all, a very important part of life in ancient Israel; in the Pentateuch, indeed, it is mainly mentioned in connection with Pharaoh's chariots and a certain stressful incident at the Red Sea.
Israel's equestrian interest changed dramatically in the tenth century, when Solomon, among his many mercantile ventures, became an international horse trader. Suddenly Israel's landscape was practically overrun with horses: "Solomon had forty thousand stalls of horses for his chariots" (1 Kings 4:26; the LXX and 2 Chr. 9:25 submit the more realistic "four thousand"). He imported horses from Egypt and elsewhere to be shipped to sundry foreign markets (1 Kings 10:25–29). This was all strictly business, of course; no mention of gift horses.
But Solomon was, we know, more than a businessman; he was also a philosopher, and, as such, a close observer of nature—"of animals, of birds, of creeping things, and of fish" (1 Kings 4:33). He discoursed of serpents and eagles, of dogs, of roosters and goats, of locusts and ants, of badgers and birds, of lions and leeches and lizards (Prov. 6:6–8; 23:32; 26:11; 27:8; 30:15,19,24–31). That he likewise mentioned the horse, therefore, is hardly surprising (Prov. 21:31).
What may be surprising is that the all-wise Solomon only mentioned the horse and, unaccountably, he paid but scant attention to the animal's "bit" (Prov. 26:3). Although the disciplined control of speech formed a major feature of Solomon's moral teaching (cf. Prov. 4:24; 5:2; 6:2; 10:14,19,31–32; 11:11; 12:13,18–19; 13:3; 14:3,7; 16:13,27; 17:20,28; 18:6–7; 24:2,7; 25:23; 26:23; 27:2), he seems not to have noticed the symbolic potential of the horse's bit to serve as an illustration of this theme.
The biblical writer who did use the horse's bit to make that moral point was the Apostle James. His appeal to the image conformed to a pattern and advanced a theme of his epistle. Right from the start, James emphasized control of the tongue as essential to the "perfect" life. "Understand, my beloved brothers," he wrote, "let every man be quick to hear but slow to speak. . . . If anyone among you seems to be religious but does not bridle his tongue (me chalinagogon glossan), he deceives his heart; his religion is empty" (1:19,26).
Among the analogies James later employs to illustrate this lesson, the first is the horse's bit: "If someone does not offend in word, he is a perfect man, able also to bridle (chalinagogesai) the whole body. We put bits (chalinous) into horses' mouths that they may obey us, and we turn their whole body" (3:2–3).
Solomon's many interesting animals were fairly easy to subdue. The tongue, says James, is not so: "For every kind of beast and bird, of reptile and creature of the sea, is tamed and has been tamed by human nature. But none among men can tame the tongue" (3:7–8).
Patrick Henry Reardon is pastor emeritus of All Saints Antiochian Orthodox Church in Chicago, Illinois, and the author of numerous books, including, most recently, Out of Step with God: Orthodox Christian Reflections on the Book of Numbers (Ancient Faith Publishing, 2019).
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