Scott McLemee’s post on someone else’s post of “the most badass Bible verses” reminds me why I enjoyed reading the OT as a child. (That’s “the OT” as in “You know you’re in the OT when…” Another game to play!)
But of course the most badass Bible verse is not actually a Bible verse, at all:
The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides with the iniquities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who in the name of charity and good will shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother’s keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon those with great vengeance and with furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know that my name is the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon thee.
It is a mash-up and a riffing upon of several verses (see the “Sidebar” here).
The Edge of the American West 
2 comments
November 30, 2007 at 4:35 pm
kelmanari
As I said yesterday, Quentin Tarantino is the Matthew Yglesias of filmmakers: creative, brilliant, and too lazy to look up an actual bible verse.
March 14, 2008 at 12:25 am
Paul A.
Tarantino doesn’t deserve the blame for this. Despite what the sidebar Eric linked to says, he doesn’t deserve the credit either.
The thing is, Jules isn’t quoting the Bible directly: he’s quoting, almost word-for-word, the passage as it appears in “Karate Kiba”, one of those 1970s martial arts flicks Tarantino is so fond of.
Whether it’s actually the way the passage appears in the Bible is, I suspect, rather beside the point.