0
0
Is “time heals all wounds” in the Bible? No. That sentence is not in any book of the Bible, and no verse says that time heals. The saying is far older than most people guess. A Greek playwright named Menander wrote a line very close to it about 2,300 years ago, and nobody can name one person who came up with the idea first. When the Bible talks about a broken heart, it never names time as the healer. It names God, and it shows comfort arriving through people who come and stay.
Almost everyone has said this one. It is easy to see why. It is short, it is kind, and it is half true. The other half is the part worth knowing.
Where “Time Heals All Wounds” Really Comes From
The oldest version we can point to comes from Athens. Menander wrote comedies there around 300 BC. Most of his plays are lost. What is left is mostly pieces, a line here and two lines there.
One of those pieces is numbered 677 in the old standard collection of his fragments. In Francis Allinson’s 1921 English translation, it reads:
“Time is healer of all the necessary ills. And even you he now will heal.”
That is all there is. Two lines, cut loose from their play. Nobody knows which play it was, who is speaking, or who is being comforted. So the line is real. But it is a line from a play, spoken by a character we cannot name. That is not the same as a rule Menander handed down.
Here is the surprise. In other pieces of Menander that survive, time is not the only healer. One says, “The spoken word is man’s physician in grief.” Another says that a sick body needs a doctor, but there is “need of a friend for him whose soul is ill.” So even the writer who gets the credit for this saying left behind lines that send grieving people toward a kind word and a friend, not only toward the calendar.
The friend who said it in English
In English, the thought turns up in the 1380s, in Geoffrey Chaucer’s long poem Troilus and Criseyde. A young man named Troilus is falling apart because the woman he loves has been sent away. His friend Pandarus tries to cheer him up. Other people get through this, he says:
“As tyme hem hurt, a tyme doth hem cure.”
In today’s English, that is roughly, “As time hurt them, a time cures them.” Pandarus adds that ten days is not long to wait, and that she will surely come back.
She does not come back. So one of the first times this idea shows up in English, it is a friend’s quick comfort inside a story where the comfort does not hold. It reads as if Chaucer already knew how the line can sound to the person hearing it.
The exact words came late
The wording we use now is much newer. By 1910 it was in print just as we say it. In H. Rider Haggard’s novel Morning Star, a Pharaoh greets a brother he fell out with years before and says, “Time heals all wounds.” He says it in passing, the way people say a proverb everybody already knows. We are not claiming that is the first time it was printed. It is only a clear sign the saying was settled by then.
Someone argued with it 2,000 years ago
The saying has had doubters for a very long time. In 45 BC the Roman writer Cicero lost his daughter Tullia. He read every book on comfort he could find. Then he wrote down his own thinking about grief in a work called the Tusculan Disputations.
Cicero agreed that grief often eases as the years go by. But he asked a sharp question. If the loss is the same and the person is the same, how can the pain change just because days went past? His answer, in C. D. Yonge’s translation, was that the remedy comes from “daily reflecting,” and “not from the length of time.”
You do not have to agree with all of Cicero. He thought the cure was to reason your way out of sorrow, and many grieving people find that cold. But his question is a good one. A calendar cannot do anything. Something else has to be at work.
If you are in a season where the days feel long and God feels far away, this free guide was made for ordinary moments like the one you are in.
What the Bible Actually Says About Time and Healing
The closest the Bible comes to the saying is in Ecclesiastes. “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven” (Ecclesiastes 3:1). A few lines on, the list includes these: “A time to kill, and a time to heal” (Ecclesiastes 3:3) and “A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance” (Ecclesiastes 3:4).
Look at what that does and does not say. There is a time to heal. Time is the season the healing happens in. It is the room, not the doctor. And mourning gets a time of its own. Nobody in that passage is told to hurry.
So who does the healing? Psalm 147:3 says it plainly: “He healeth the broken in heart, and bindeth up their wounds.” The “He” is God. And binding up a wound is close work. Someone has to come near to do it. The Hebrew word for healing is used in the Old Testament for mending all sorts of broken things, not only bodies.
The Bible is also honest that years alone may not close a wound. When Jacob was told his son Joseph was dead, his whole family tried to console him, “but he refused to be comforted” (Genesis 37:35). Some twenty years later he is still carrying it. He says that losing another son would “bring down my gray hairs with sorrow to the grave” (Genesis 42:38). Two decades had gone by. The grief was still there. And the Bible never scolds him for it.
Then there is the way comfort travels. Jesus said, “Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted” (Matthew 5:4). To be comforted is to have someone do it for you. Paul writes this about God: “Who comforteth us in all our tribulation, that we may be able to comfort them which are in any trouble” (2 Corinthians 1:4). Comfort starts with God. Then it is passed along by hand, from one person to the next.
Why the Difference Matters
This saying is usually spoken within days of a loss, by someone who loves you and does not know what else to say. That is a good heart at work. And there is truth in it. For most people, the sharpest pain does change with time.
But heard alone, the saying gives only one instruction: wait. It does not say who will sit with you while you wait. And when a year has passed and the ache is still there, a person can start to think, “Something must be wrong with me. Time was supposed to fix this.”
Nothing is wrong with you. In 1996 a grief counsellor named Lois Tonkin wrote about a mother whose child had died. The mother had expected her grief to shrink as the years passed. It did not. What happened instead was that her life slowly grew larger around it. There was room again for other things, even though the grief was still the same size. Grief support charities such as Cruse now share her picture. It is known as “growing around grief.”
That is much closer to Jacob than to the proverb. It is also closer to those other lines of Menander. Time gives the room. What fills the room does the mending: a friend who still calls in month six, words spoken out loud, a God who comes near to bind up what is broken.
If you are the one grieving, there is no deadline you have missed. If it would help to put a name to where you are today, our short What Stage of Grief Am I In? check-in is free. And if you have also been told that God won’t give you more than you can handle, that saying has a story of its own.
If you are the one who said it to a friend, you did nothing wrong. You were being kind. Next time, you might add the part the saying leaves out: “and I will be here while it does.”
So keep the saying if you like it. Just know what it is. It is an old line from a lost play. Cicero doubted it. Chaucer put it in the mouth of a friend. And it has been said at kitchen tables ever since. Time is real, and it helps. But in the Bible, time is where healing happens. The healing itself has always come from someone.
Over to You
When you were hurting, what helped more than the passing of time? And which other sayings have you always assumed were in the Bible? Tell us in the comments. Your answer may help someone who is in the middle of it right now.
Want a simple way to notice God in the middle of an ordinary day? This free video guide and companion PDF is a gentle place to start.
Questions People Ask About “Time Heals All Wounds”
Is “time heals all wounds” in the Bible?
No. “Time heals all wounds” is not in the Bible, and no verse says that time heals. The closest passage is Ecclesiastes 3:3, which says there is “A time to kill, and a time to heal.” That verse treats time as the season when healing happens, not as the healer. Psalm 147:3 names the healer: “He healeth the broken in heart, and bindeth up their wounds.”
Who first said “time heals all wounds”?
Nobody knows who first said “time heals all wounds,” because the idea has no single author. The oldest version we can point to is a fragment of the Greek playwright Menander, who wrote around 300 BC: “Time is healer of all the necessary ills.” Geoffrey Chaucer has a version in English in the 1380s, in Troilus and Criseyde. The exact modern wording was in print by 1910, in H. Rider Haggard’s novel Morning Star.
What does the Bible say heals a broken heart?
The Bible says God heals a broken heart. Psalm 147:3 says, “He healeth the broken in heart, and bindeth up their wounds.” Psalm 34:18 says, “The LORD is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart.” The Bible also shows comfort arriving through people. 2 Corinthians 1:4 says God comforts us “that we may be able to comfort them which are in any trouble.”
Is it true that time heals all wounds?
It is half true. Time heals all wounds only in the sense that the sharpest pain usually changes as time passes. Time by itself does nothing. People also say “time heals everything,” “time heals all things” or “time is a great healer,” and the same limit applies to each one. The Roman writer Cicero made this point in 45 BC, after his daughter died. In 1996, grief counsellor Lois Tonkin described a mother whose grief did not shrink at all. Her life grew around it instead.
What can I say instead of “time heals all wounds”?
Instead of “time heals all wounds,” try words that promise your company and not a timeline. “I am so sorry, and I am not going anywhere” does that. So does “You do not have to be okay by any date.” These fit the Bible’s picture in Romans 12:15: “Rejoice with them that do rejoice, and weep with them that weep.”
Social Share Posts
I always thought “time heals all wounds” was in the Bible. It isn’t. The Bible says there is “a time to heal,” and then it names who does the healing (Psalm 147:3). Time is the room, not the doctor.
Today I learned “time heals all wounds” goes back to a Greek playwright about 2,300 years ago. The same writer also said a grieving soul needs a friend. That second line never made it onto the sympathy card.
Jacob was still grieving Joseph some twenty years later, and the Bible never scolds him for it. If time has not “healed” you yet, nothing is wrong with you.
