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Is “forgive and forget” in the Bible? No. The phrase is not there – not in the King James Version, not in any wording. And it goes further than that. Across all 31,102 verses of the King James Bible, a word for forgiving and a word for forgetting never once turn up in the same verse. Not once. “Forgive and forget” is an old English proverb. It was already common enough to be collected in a book of proverbs in 1546, and Shakespeare used the pairing in five different plays. The Bible asks people to forgive in dozens of places. It never asks anyone to forget.
That gap matters, because this is a sentence people say to someone who has just been badly hurt. Here is where it really came from, and what scripture puts in its place instead.
Where “Forgive and Forget” Actually Comes From
The oldest printing I can put my hands on is from 1546. An English writer called John Heywood published a collection of the proverbs ordinary people were already using – a long rhyming book about marriage, built almost entirely out of sayings.
In it, a husband who has wronged his wife comes back to her, repentant, “praying her to forgive and forget all.” (The spelling there is from a modern edition; Heywood’s own spelling was older.)
She says no.
Well, well! (quoth she), whatever ye now say,
It is too late to call again yesterday.
So the phrase was already a proverb by 1546 – old enough to be collected rather than invented. How much older than that is genuinely hard to pin down, and I would rather say so plainly than guess at a date.
Fifty years later it was still everywhere. Shakespeare reaches for the pairing in at least five plays: Richard II, Henry VI Part 3, All’s Well That Ends Well, King Lear and The Winter’s Tale.
The one in Richard II is worth slowing down for. Two noblemen are accusing each other in front of the king, and one of them, Mowbray, has had his name dragged through the mud in public. The king wants the whole business to go away. So he tells them both:
Forget, forgive, conclude and be agreed.
Mowbray refuses. The king can have anything else, he says, but not this:
My life thou shalt command, but not my shame.
Notice the pattern in the two oldest uses we can actually go and check. Both times, “forgive and forget” is said by somebody who wants a quarrel closed, to somebody who was wronged. And both times, the wronged person says no.
Shakespeare does turn it round once, and it is the gentlest version of the phrase in the language. An old king who has wrecked his own family finally finds the daughter he threw away, and says to her:
Pray you now, forget and forgive: I am old and foolish.
That is Lear asking on his own behalf, not instructing her. It is a completely different sentence from the one the phrase usually carries.
The Detail That Surprised Me Most
Open an English copy of Don Quixote and you will find Don Quixote saying this to Sancho Panza, after the two of them have fallen out:
Friend Panza, let us forgive and forget as to our quarrels.
Cervantes never wrote that. In the Spanish, the line is “Echemos, Panza amigo, pelillos a la mar” – literally, “let us throw little hairs into the sea.” It comes from an old children’s custom: you pull out a hair, blow it away, and the quarrel is over. There is no “forgive” in it. There is no “forget” in it either. The English proverb was simply so close to hand that the translator reached for it.
That is how deep into English this phrase goes. Deep enough to turn up in a book that never said it.
If finding out that a famous saying was never scripture makes you curious about what actually is in there, the whole Book of Matthew is free below – a PDF to read and a 28-chapter audiobook to listen to.
Is “Forgive and Forget” in the Bible Anywhere? What the Verses Actually Say
People usually do have a verse in mind when they say it. Nearly always it is this one, and it rewards reading slowly:
And they shall teach no more every man his neighbour, and every man his brother, saying, Know the LORD: for they shall all know me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them, saith the LORD: for I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more. (Jeremiah 31:34, KJV)
The same promise gets quoted again in the New Testament:
For I will be merciful to their unrighteousness, and their sins and their iniquities will I remember no more. (Hebrews 8:12, KJV)
And once more, in Isaiah:
I, even I, am he that blotteth out thy transgressions for mine own sake, and will not remember thy sins. (Isaiah 43:25, KJV)
Two things about those verses, and I want to be exact about both.
First, the word is not “forget.” It is “remember no more.” Jeremiah 31:34 does put forgiving and not-remembering inside one sentence, so it is the closest thing in the Bible to the proverb, and anyone who reached for it was reaching for something real. But “forget” is a different word doing a different job, and the text does not use it.
Second, the speaker is God, talking about God. These are not instructions handed to a person who has been hurt. They are promises about what God will never raise again.
And “remember” in the Bible is rarely about what is kept in mind. It is usually about what gets done. When Genesis says “God remembered Noah,” it does not mean Noah had slipped anyone’s mind. Read the rest of the verse:
And God remembered Noah, and every living thing, and all the cattle that was with him in the ark: and God made a wind to pass over the earth, and the waters asswaged. (Genesis 8:1, KJV)
To remember is to act on. Which means to remember a sin “no more” is to stop acting on it – to stop holding it over anyone, to stop collecting on it. The record is not deleted. It is settled. That is the same instinct running through the Hebrew word behind the whole idea of atonement, a word that means a covering rather than an erasing.
Joseph Forgave and Remembered Every Detail
If anyone in the Bible had grounds to want a memory wiped, it was Joseph. His own brothers sold him. Years later, with their father dead and Joseph now powerful enough to do whatever he liked to them, they come to him terrified.
Here is what he says:
But as for you, ye thought evil against me; but God meant it unto good, to bring to pass, as it is this day, to save much people alive. Now therefore fear ye not: I will nourish you, and your little ones. And he comforted them, and spake kindly unto them. (Genesis 50:20-21, KJV)
Read the first part again. “But as for you, ye thought evil against me.”
He names it. Out loud. In the same breath in which he forgives them and promises to feed their children. He does not say it never happened. He does not say it was fine. He does not pretend to have mislaid it. He remembers it precisely, and then declines to use it.
The instruction Jesus gives works the same way:
Take heed to yourselves: If thy brother trespass against thee, rebuke him; and if he repent, forgive him. (Luke 17:3, KJV)
You cannot do one single part of that while forgetting. You have to remember what happened, be able to say what it was, and notice whether the person is sorry. Forgetting would make the whole instruction impossible to follow.
Why the Difference Matters
Almost everyone has said “forgive and forget,” and almost everyone has had it said to them. It is usually said kindly, by people who love us and simply want the hurting to stop. There is nothing embarrassing about having filed it under scripture – it sounds exactly like scripture, and sounding like scripture is most of how it has lasted five hundred years.
But look at what it asks for, and at what it does to a person who takes it seriously.
If forgiving requires forgetting, then every time the memory comes back – and it will come back – you have failed again. You get handed a test you cannot pass, and you get handed it in the worst week of your life. People stay stuck in that loop for years. Not because they are unforgiving, but because the only exit anyone ever described to them was a door that does not exist.
Remembering is also how a person stays safe. If someone hurt you badly, the memory is the thing that tells you where it is not safe to stand. Nothing in the Bible asks anyone to erase that. Forgiving someone and letting them back into your life are two entirely separate decisions, and you are allowed to make only the first one.
What scripture actually asks for is smaller, harder and possible. Keep the record. Stop paying rent on it. Research into what happens in the brain when people forgive points the same way: the memory stays exactly where it was, and the only thing that changes is the weight attached to it.
If this is the sort of thing you like to check, there is a companion piece on “to err is human, to forgive divine” – another forgiveness saying nearly everyone files under scripture, which turns out to have been written by an English poet about literary critics.
A Short Prayer
God, I cannot forget it, and I have stopped pretending otherwise.
Help me put it down without lying about it.
Keep me honest about what happened. Keep me safe. And take the weight of it off me a little at a time.
I am not there yet. Stay with me while I get there. Amen.
Discussion Question
Which other sayings did you always assume were in the Bible? “God helps those who help themselves” and “this too shall pass” catch nearly everybody. Tell me in the comments which one got you – the ones people name here usually turn into the next article.
And the free Book of Matthew is here if you want it: the full text plus the audiobook, including the chapter where Jesus talks about forgiving.
Share This
- I genuinely thought “forgive and forget” was a Bible verse. It is an English proverb from 1546, and in all 31,102 verses of the KJV those two words never once share a verse. The Bible asks you to forgive. It never asks you to forget.
- The oldest printed use of “forgive and forget” I can find is 1546 – a husband asking his wife to drop it, and she refuses. Shakespeare’s version is a king telling two wronged men to let it go, and one of them refuses too. In the early sources, nobody actually forgets.
- Joseph forgave his brothers and in the very same sentence said “ye thought evil against me.” He named it. That is the model: keep the record, stop paying rent on it.
Questions People Ask About “Forgive and Forget”
Is “forgive and forget” in the Bible?
No. “Forgive and forget” does not appear in the Bible in any form. Across all 31,102 verses of the King James Bible, a word for forgiving and a word for forgetting never once appear in the same verse. The phrase is an English proverb that was already in common use by 1546, when John Heywood collected it in a book of proverbs. The Bible instructs people to forgive in many places. It never instructs anyone to forget.
What Bible verse says “forgive and forget”?
There is no Bible verse that says “forgive and forget.” The verse most people have in mind is Jeremiah 31:34, which reads in the King James Version: “for I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.” It is quoted again in Hebrews 8:12. Two details are worth noticing: the wording is “remember no more” rather than “forget,” and the speaker is God making a promise about God – it is not an instruction given to a person who has been hurt.
Where does “forgive and forget” come from, if not from scripture?
“Forgive and forget” is an old English proverb. The earliest printing that can easily be checked is John Heywood’s 1546 collection of English proverbs, in which a husband asks his wife to forgive and forget – and she refuses him. Shakespeare used the pairing in at least five plays, including Richard II and King Lear, where it appears in the older order, “forget and forgive.” It was a stock English saying long before anybody attached it to the Bible.
Does the Bible say God forgets our sins?
The Bible says God will “remember” them “no more,” which is not quite the same thing as forgetting. Jeremiah 31:34 and Hebrews 8:12 both use that wording, and Isaiah 43:25 says God “will not remember thy sins.” In biblical usage, to remember is usually to act rather than to recall: Genesis 8:1 says “God remembered Noah” and then describes God acting to end the flood. So “remember no more” reads as a promise to stop acting on an offence and never raise it again, rather than a claim that the record has been deleted.
Does forgiving someone mean you have to forget what they did?
No, and the Bible never asks for it. Joseph forgives his brothers in Genesis 50 while saying out loud exactly what they did: “ye thought evil against me.” In Luke 17:3 Jesus tells people to rebuke the one who wronged them and to forgive if that person repents, which requires remembering the offence clearly enough to name it. Forgiving someone and letting them back into your life are two separate decisions, and it is reasonable to make the first without the second.
