The image is Isaiah’s, but the sentence is not. Isaiah 11:6 pairs the lamb with the wolf and the kid with the leopard, while Isaiah 65:25 has the lion eating straw; the popular line welds the lion from one verse onto the lying-down from the other. The phrase “lie down with the lamb” appears nowhere in the King James Bible, and the oldest instance we could document is John Quincy Adams’s message to Congress of 4 December 1827.
“The lion shall lie down with the lamb” is not in the Bible. Isaiah 11:6 pairs the lamb with the wolf — "The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid" — and Isaiah 65:25 has the lion eating straw like the bullock. The popular line blends the two. The oldest documented instance of the blended wording is John Quincy Adams's Third Annual Message to Congress, 4 December 1827. — Quotle.info · Verbatim: “presenting, though as yet with painful exceptions, a foretaste of that blessed period of promise when the lion shall lie down with the lamb and wars shall be no more.”
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Evoking the world of The Book of Isaiah — source of the peaceable-kingdom vision in chapters 11 and 65. Theme: "The lion shall lie down with the lamb". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.
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Provenance
What Isaiah actually says
The verses people mean
Isaiah 11:6–7 and Isaiah 65:25
Translation
King James Version, the 1769 standard text
Paired with the lamb
the wolf — not the lion
Popular wording documented in
John Quincy Adams, Third Annual Message to Congress, 4 December 1827
The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them. And the cow and the bear shall feed; their young ones shall lie down together: and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.
Isaiah 11:6–7, KJV
The lion is present — but it is grazing beside the ox, not resting beside the lamb, and the lamb’s companion is the wolf. Isaiah 65:25 repeats the picture: “The wolf and the lamb shall feed together, and the lion shall eat straw like the bullock.”
Isaiah 11:6 pairs the lamb with the wolf. The King James text at Wikisource ↗ reads “The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid.” The lion arrives in the next verse — eating straw like the ox.
The sentence is not in the Bible at all. Searching the complete King James text at Project Gutenberg ↗ for “lie down with the lamb” returns nothing, and no major modern translation renders Isaiah 11:6 that way either (NIV, ESV, NASB, NRSV, NLT, CSB compared ↗).
A U.S. president used the blended wording in 1827. John Quincy Adams’s Third Annual Message to Congress, 4 December 1827, looks forward to “that blessed period of promise when the lion shall lie down with the lamb and wars shall be no more” — text at The American Presidency Project ↗, and in the collected messages at Project Gutenberg ↗.
Then it spread through the newspapers. The Southern Christian Advocate ↗ of 23 January 1852 ran it as a headline — “THE LION SHALL LIE DOWN WITH THE LAMB” — over a story about a cat that had befriended a sparrow.
✓Public domain
Every text quoted here is long out of copyright in the United States. The King James Isaiah is reproduced from the 1769 standard text, and John Quincy Adams’s Third Annual Message of 4 December 1827 is a work of the U.S. federal government published nearly two centuries ago. The popular paraphrase itself has no identifiable author, so there is no one to hold rights in it.
Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.
Fact-check
Where the wording actually goes wrong
The line gets quoted from pulpits, in peace speeches and on greeting cards as though it carried a chapter and verse. It does not. It is a splice of two separate visions in Isaiah, and the splice changes the animals.
✕
Isaiah 11:6The Book of Isaiah Wrong animal
This is the verse people mean, and it pairs the lamb with a wolf: “The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together” (King James text ↗). Every major modern translation keeps the wolf there too — NIV, ESV, NASB, NRSV, NLT and CSB (parallel translations ↗).
✕
Isaiah 65:25The Book of Isaiah Wrong verb
The lion does appear in Isaiah’s other vision of peace, but it is not lying down with anything: “The wolf and the lamb shall feed together, and the lion shall eat straw like the bullock” (Isaiah 65:25 ↗). The popular line borrows the lion from here and the lying-down from 11:6.
✕
“It’s in the Bible somewhere”Scripture in general Not found
A search of the complete King James Version at Project Gutenberg ↗ returns the phrase “lie down with the lamb” zero times, in any book. The only verses containing both a lion and a lamb are Isaiah 11:6–7, Isaiah 65:25 and 1 Samuel 17:34, where a lion carries a lamb off from David’s flock. (Revelation 5:5–6 sets the Lion of Judah beside the slain Lamb, but neither lies down with anything.)
✓The image is genuinely Isaiah’s; the sentence is not. The oldest instance of the blended wording we could document is John Quincy Adams’s message to Congress of 4 December 1827 (full text ↗) — and even there he uses it as a familiar tag, which means somebody was saying it before him.
Context
Why the wrong version won
Isaiah’s actual vision is stranger, and in its way more radical, than the version people remember. The wolf does not merely tolerate the lamb, it dwells with it; the leopard beds down with a young goat; and the lion — the one animal everybody wants in the picture — is off to one side eating straw like an ox. Predators are not restrained in this future. They are changed.
The popular sentence flattens all of that into a single clean pairing, and it wins on pure image. The lion is the apex predator of the imagination and the lamb is the definition of prey, so setting them shoulder to shoulder makes the point in seven words. That is why the paraphrase turns up in presidential messages, peace sermons and newspaper headlines, while the real verse — with its leopard, its kid and its straw-eating lion — stays in the Bible.
Isaiah’s lion does not lie down with the lamb. It eats straw.
The paper trail, from 1827 onward
On 4 December 1827 John Quincy Adams sent his Third Annual Message to Congress and described the state of the world as “a foretaste of that blessed period of promise when the lion shall lie down with the lamb and wars shall be no more” (American Presidency Project ↗). He was plainly not coining anything — he drops the phrase in as a tag his readers would already recognise — but the newspapers that reprinted the message that same week carried the misquotation to every corner of the country, beginning with the Phenix Gazette ↗ of Alexandria.
After that it travelled on its own. The Indiana State Sentinel ↗ of 6 June 1850 reached for it to mean the end of days: “When the lion shall lie down with the lamb — when the new heavens and the new earth are created.” The humorist Josh Billings got a joke out of it too: “The lion and the lamb may, possibly, sumtime lay down in this world together for a fu minnits, but when the lion kums tew git up, the lamb will be missing” (The Complete Works of Josh Billings ↗).
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Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
Hebrew prophetic book · source of the peaceable-kingdom vision in chapters 11 and 65
The Book of Isaiah is the origin of the peaceable-kingdom imagery that the popular quotation is reaching for: chapter 11’s vision of predators and prey at rest under a child’s hand, and chapter 65’s picture of a lion grazing like an ox. What Isaiah never says is that the lion lies down with the lamb. In 11:6 the lamb’s companion is the wolf, the leopard beds down with a young goat, and the lion appears one verse later — eating straw.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Primary sources
Isaiah 11:6–7 and 65:25, The Holy Bible, King James Version (1769 standard text), Wikisource. The popular wording is not scriptural; the oldest documented instance located is John Quincy Adams, “Third Annual Message,” 4 December 1827, in Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, eds., The American Presidency Project.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘The lion shall lie down with the lamb’?” Last verified 27 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/the-lion-shall-lie-down-with-the-lamb/