‘To beard the lion’ and ‘in the lion’s den’ – or the lions’ den?

I’ve been thinking a lot of late – nay, obsessing even – about the hundreds of animal metaphors that colour up English and how they reflect conceptual metaphor theory as first outlined by Lakoff and Johnson in their seminal 1980 Metaphors We Live By.

Recently, I’ve been looking at cat-related ones, including the ‘big cats’, who provide two clear examples, to my mind, of the conceptual metaphor TO ACT COURAGEOUSLY IS TO CONFRONT A DANGEROUS ANIMAL – exemplified in another family of the animal kingdom by to take the bull by the horns.

The two are biblical in origin: to beard the lion in his den and (Daniel) in the lion’s den. They’re still quite often used, as a look at corpus data shows, and I wonder how many people who use them are aware of their ‘back story’.

To beard the lion in his den

Here’s a quotation from New Zealand in 2019 that extends the metaphor even as it encourages young eco-warriors:

You have your fight in front of you, and if you are to succeed, you need to beard the lion pack of climate change deniers in their dens.

People more religious than me will be familiar with the biblical tale, so you’ll humour me if I repeat it.

I’ve had great pleasure today reading it in the treasured Bible (Authorised Version/King James Bible) my mum and dad gave me at my confirmation fifty-six years ago. It was no less a person than the local bishop who confirmed me and my fellow confirmands – now, there’s a word I’ve never had cause to use till now. Not only that: he christened me, too. My loving parents had somehow overlooked that rite earlier, don’t ask me why. And as they’re no longer here, I can’t ask them.

I’m digressing bigly.

Even if you don’t know about bearding the lion, you probably know how the youthful David,  immortalised in sculpture by the Renaissance masters Donatello and Verrocchio before Michelangelo got in on the act, slew the giant Goliath. But as he was only a mere stripling, he had to prove to King Saul that he was up for the top job (1 Samuel 17:35). This he did by telling Saul that, while guarding his father’s flock, a lion and a bear had come and stolen a sheep:

And I went out after him, and smote[1] him, and delivered it out of his mouth: and when he arose against me, I caught him by his beard, and smote him, and slew him.

Note that phrase ‘caught him by his beard.’ The Vulgate Latin version has mentum, meaning ‘the chin’ or ‘the chin with the hair that grows on it’. Coverdale’s 1535 version of the Bible translates this as ‘beerde’, which the Authorised Version has taken over in the extract above.

Now, you might think that to beard the lion is a case of ‘verbing’ specially undertaken to create that biblical saying. Not a bit of it. The verb to beard, which historically has no fewer than nine meanings, already existed and dates back to before 1425. One of its meanings, first recorded in 1476, is ‘to oppose someone boldly or insolently’. So it was an easy matter in 1649 for John Barford in his verse Paraphrastical Meditations upon Isaiah 55 and Psalm 51 to use the phrase in its literal sense:

A stripling small that seemed but a boie,
Did beard the Lion, and a Bear destroie.

But the first citation in the OED of the phrase in its current form, that is, mentioning the ‘den’, and as a metaphor, has to wait till Sir Walter Scott’s Marmion of 1808:

And dar’st thou then
To beard the lion in his den,
The Douglas in his hall?

Marmion vi. xiv. 338

Daniel in the Lions’ Den, Sir Peter Paul Rubens, c.1614-16. National Gallery of Art, Washington. Ailsa Mellon Bruce Fund.

(Daniel) in the lion’s den

Being in the lion’s den refers to confronting a situation that is uncomfortable, demanding or distressing. What follows is an example from sporting journalism, a genre which never eschews a colourful or dynamic metaphor, from the Bournemouth Echo (UK) in 2022.

Rather than baulk at the prospect of entering the proverbial lion’s den on Saturday, Parker claims his side relish fixtures with big things riding on the result.

The metaphor derives from the story of Daniel, a mythical Jewish seer highly favoured by Nebuchadnezzar, the King of Babylon, and by a successor, Darius, King of the Medes and Persians, as told in the Bible Book of Daniel, 6.

Daniel is placed in a position of power by Darius ‘because an excellent spirit was in him’ and is set over the king’s ‘an hundred and twenty princes’, the functionaries we would know better as ‘satraps’, the provincial governors of the Persian Empire. But his enemies conspire against Daniel and persuade the king to pass a decree that ‘whosoever shall ask a petition’ (i.e. pray) to any god or person other than the king will be cast into the den of lions.

Because of his Jewish faith, Daniel must ignore the decree and, inevitably, is found praying, with his windows open in the direction of the Jerusalem from which the Jewish diaspora living in Babylon feels exiled. With a heavy heart, the king commands him to be cast into the lions’ den, for ‘the law of the Medes and Persians altereth not’, and seals it shut with his own signet ring.

That night the king fasts, has no musicians perform for him, and ‘his sleep went from him.’ In the morning he rushes to the cave and asks Daniel if his god has delivered him from the lions. Daniel explains that an angel ‘hath shut the lions’ mouths’, and when he comes out of the den, ‘no manner of hurt was found upon him.’ With the gruesomeness typical of the Old Testament, Daniel’s enemies, their wives and children are literally thrown to the lions, and Darius issues an edict that Daniel’s god is to be feared and reverenced – a major piece of ahistorical retrospective wishful thinking.

As David Crystal has pointed out, while the Authorised Version talks of ‘the den of lions’, the modern metaphor is ‘the lion’s den.’ Why? Because since the seventeenth century it has been the norm for nouns denoting animate beings to have a ‘premodifying genitive’, that is, lion’s den, in this case, not den of lions.

As for whether it’s a singular lion’s den or a plural lions’ den, people seem to use each in roughly equal proportion, though obviously lions’ makes more sense, given that a den surely has to contain more than one lion.

[1] ‘Smote’, in case you’re flummoxed by it, is the past tense of the now archaic verb to smite, ‘to strike very hard’, something which the Old Testament God and his believers seemed to relish doing to His/their enemies. It occurs 221 times, smite 133 and smitten 62.