Tool Beta
Is It Actually in the Bible?
Phrases people quote as Scripture. The real verse, or the honest answer that there is not one.
"Eat, drink, and be merry" is the Bible's advice for how to live
In Jesus's parable, the man who says this dies that same night: it's the opposite of the moral.
Luke 12:19, in every translation this tool compares.
The line is spoken by the rich fool in Luke's parable, congratulating himself after a record harvest fills his barns beyond capacity: "I will say to my soul, Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry" (Luke 12:19). It's a moment of smug self-satisfaction, written to sound exactly like reasonable retirement planning.
God's reply arrives in the very next verse, without transition: "Fool! This night your soul is required of you, and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?" (Luke 12:20). Quoted in isolation, "eat, drink, and be merry" sounds like life advice lifted straight from Scripture. Read in its actual two-verse span, it's the exact posture (security built on accumulated wealth with no regard for anything beyond it) the parable exists to warn against. A near-identical phrase also shows up in Ecclesiastes (2:24, 8:15) in a very different, more resigned key, which adds to the confusion, but the popular quotation almost always traces back to this parable specifically.
