sword [OE] As with *swim, Beowulf gives us the first example of sword. The notion of devoting resources to peaceful rather than aggressive or warlike ends is sometimes expressed as beating (or turning) swords into ploughshares, a reference to the biblical image of God’s peaceful rule: ‘they shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks’ (Book of Isaiah). Also biblical is the expression he who lives by the sword dies by the sword—in the Gospel of Matthew, when men came to arrest Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane one of his disciples drew his sword and cut off the ear of ‘the servant of the high priest’, earning a rebuke from Jesus: ‘All they that take the sword shall perish with the sword.’ See also thread.