Donald Trump Reveals His Favorite Bible Passage—Which He Made Up

Donald Trump has repeatedly named the Bible as his favorite book. But when asked almost three weeks ago to reveal his favorite verse, the presidential candidate seemed to get a little hot under the collar. “I wouldn’t want to get into it because to me that’s very personal,” he said in an interview with Bloomberg TV. “The Bible means a lot to me but I don’t want to get into specifics.”

In an interview with The Christian Broadcasting Network’s “The Brody File,” Trump finally told us: He likes what the Book of Proverbs says about not bending to envy.

“There’s so many things that you can learn from [the Bible]. Proverbs, the chapter ‘never bend to envy.’ I’ve had that thing all of my life where people are bending to envy … The more you see [the Bible], the more you read it, the more incredible it is. I don’t like to use this analogy, but it’s like a great movie, a great, incredible movie. You’ll see it once, it will be good. You’ll see it again. You can see it 20 times and every time you’ll appreciate it more. The Bible is the most special thing,” he declared.

But Trump’s favorite passage doesn’t seem to actually exist.

The Washington Post explains:

It was not clear whether Trump appreciated the passage because he had struggled with envy personally, or whether he was referring to envy he had experienced from others.

It also wasn’t clear which verse the Republican front-runner was talking about: A search of several of the most-used standard versions of the Bible did not turn up any verse or chapter that urges people not to “bend to envy.”

In the King James Version of the Bible, there are several mentions of envy in Proverbs: “Envy thou not the oppressor, and choose none of his ways,” reads Proverbs 3:31. Envy is “rottenness to the bones,” says Proverbs 14:30. And there’s Proverbs 23:17: “Let not thine heart envy sinners.” But there does not appear to be any verse in that book, or in other parts of the Bible, that urges readers to “never bend to envy.”

CBN reporter David Brody, who conducted the interview, told The Washington Post that Trump aides said the candidate was referring to Proverbs 24:1-2: “Be not thou envious against evil men, neither desire to be with them. For their heart studieth destruction, and their lips talk of mischief.”

This raises the question of whether Trump’s reference to the “people … bending to envy” he’d experienced in his life was a self-reference, or what other interpretation of the verse there might be.

Read more here.

–Posted by Roisin Davis