through our literature so pervasively that we often take them for granted. The Gettysburg Address offers a small but telling example. Why, Alter asks, did Lincoln begin by saying "Four score and seven years ago," rather than just "eighty-seven years ago?" The answer is that he was drawing, perhaps unconsciously, on the phrase "three score and ten," which appears 111 times in the King James Bible. By measuring time in this formal, archaic fashion, Lincoln raises American history to the same level as sacred history. At the end of the Address, Lincoln again turns to the Bible: When he promises that American democracy "shall not perish from the earth," he is echoing a phrase from Job and Jeremiah.from Adam Kirsch: Tablet: Heirs to the Throne
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