Meaning & Analysis
To conceal a candle beneath a container (a bushel), thereby preventing its light from illuminating the surrounding area.
Insights
Concealing Talent or Virtue
The proverb warns against hiding one's abilities, wisdom, or virtues from the world. It implies that gifts are meant to be shared, not suppressed or kept private out of fear or false modesty.
Neglecting Responsibility to Enlighten
It suggests that those with knowledge, truth, or spiritual insight have a duty to share them. Hiding such 'light' is a failure of ethical or moral responsibility.
Self-Sabotage or Timidity
The phrase also criticizes personal insecurity or humility taken to excess. It implies that withholding one’s full potential from the world diminishes not only oneself but also those who might benefit.
Biblical and Didactic Origin
This proverb derives directly from Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:15), where it serves as a call to moral visibility and evangelical duty. It emphasizes the Christian ideal of living as a visible witness to truth and goodness.
Cultural Encouragement of Self-Expression
It has resonated far beyond religious contexts as a defense of self-expression, creativity, and intellectual openness. It critiques cultures or systems that stifle individual brilliance through conformity or fear.
Metaphor of Light as Wisdom and Identity
Light here symbolizes truth, insight, and identity. Hiding it beneath a ‘bushel’—a mundane, practical container—suggests the tragic tendency to obscure one’s essence through routine, repression, or societal constraint.
Economic and Spiritual Echoes
The term 'bushel' connects spiritual imagery with domestic or economic life—transforming an everyday object into a vessel of moral critique. The proverb reflects how divine or inner worth may be smothered by material or mundane preoccupations.
Rhetorical Devices
Biblical Allusion
Its force derives from scriptural authority, lending the phrase moral weight and theological depth while making it memorable across centuries of Christian discourse.
Metaphor
The candle or light functions as a rich metaphor for truth, virtue, and personal identity, and the ‘bushel’ becomes a symbol of concealment, repression, or neglect.
Concrete Imagery
Its vivid depiction of light being covered allows for immediate visual comprehension, strengthening the proverb's didactic power and universal applicability.
Transcription
Quotations
What doth the light of a candle profit a man being in a dark house, if it be hid and set under a bushel?
All such bright lights should not be put under a bushel.
The light of God’s word, hid from them under two bushels for sureness.
I have not busheld my light nor buried my talent in the ground.
Bible Citations
Neither do men light a candle, and put it under a bushel.
Cross References
- See St., no. 1385.
Related Proverbs
Original Scan
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