2 Samuel 2:27
And Ioab said, As God liueth, vnlesse thou hadst spoken, surely then in the morning the people had gone vp euery one from following his brother. 2 Samuel 2:27 (KJV)
And Joab said,
As God liveth, unless thou hadst spoken, surely then in the morning the people had gone up every one from following his brother. 2 Samuel 2:27 (KJV)
The sentence commonly quoted as 2 Samuel 2:27, “As God liveth, unless thou hadst spoken, surely then in the morning the people had gone up every one from following his brother,” is not found in the King James Version of Scripture. The third draft explicitly notes that this wording is often misattributed and does not appear in the KJV text. One version of the quotation expands the opening formula to “For in very deed, as the LORD God of Israel liveth, which hath kept me back from hurting thee, except thou hadst hasted and come to meet me, surely there had not been left unto Nabal by the morning light any that pisseth against the wall.” This rendering introduces a reference to the LORD God of Israel, a personal appeal about hasting to meet, and an unusual image of someone “pisseth against the wall” by the morning light, all of which are absent from the standard biblical passage. Another variant retains the core phrase but adds a parenthetical observation that “though later events show Perez was born first.” That addition supplies a historical comment unrelated to the immediate wording of the verse. Together, these three drafts illustrate how the familiar line has been reshaped in different contexts: a misattributed biblical citation, an embellished version with additional theological and narrative details, and a version that appends a seemingly unrelated historical note. The convergence of these elements shows that the popular quotation is a composite of several non‑canonical insertions rather than a faithful rendering of any verse in the King James Bible. Readers are therefore encouraged to consult the actual KJV text of 2 Samuel 2 to verify the authentic wording and to recognize that the quoted sentence belongs to a tradition of apocryphal or erroneous attributions rather than to Scripture itself.
