flesh [OE] The most tangible part of the human body is flesh, and since the Middle Ages people have described their children, brothers, sisters, and other family members as their own flesh and blood. In the Book of Genesis God takes out one of Adam’s ribs when he was sleeping, and made it into a woman, Eve. Adam said, ‘This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.’ To go the way of all flesh is to die. It is from a 17th-century English translation of the Bible, which in most bibles is rendered as ‘Go the way of all the earth’. Fleshpots [E16th], ‘places providing luxurious living’, also come from the Bible, in which they are literally pots in which meat is boiled. In the Book of Exodus, when the Israelites are making their laborious way through the desert after their escape from Egypt, they lament, ‘Would to God that we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the flesh pots, and when we did eat bread to the full.’