God bless you (
variants include God bless or
bless you[1]) is a common English expression, used to wish a person
blessings in various situations,
[1][2] especially as a
response to a sneeze, and also,
when parting or writing a
valediction.
[1][3]
The phrase has been used in the
Hebrew Bible by
Jews (cf.
Numbers 6:24), and by Christians, since the time of the
early Church as a
benediction, as well as a means of bidding a person
Godspeed.
[4][5] Many clergy, when blessing their congregants individually or corporately, use the phrase "God bless you".
[6]
National Geographic reports that during the plague of 590 AD, "
Pope Gregory I ordered unceasing prayer for divine intercession. Part of his command was that anyone sneezing be blessed immediately ("God bless you"), since sneezing was often the first sign that someone was falling ill with the plague."
[7] By 750 AD, it became customary to say "God bless you" as a response to one sneezing.
[8]
The practice of blessing someone who sneezes, dating as far back as at least 77 AD, however, is far older than most specific explanations can account for.
[9] Gregory I became Pope in 590 AD as an
outbreak of the
bubonic plague was reaching Rome. In hopes of fighting off the disease, he ordered unending prayer and parades of chanters through the streets. At the time, sneezing was thought to be an early symptom of the plague. The blessing ("God bless you!") became a common effort to halt the disease.
[7]
Some have offered an explanation suggesting that people once held the folk belief that a person's
soul could be thrown from their body when they sneezed,
[9] that sneezing otherwise opened the body to invasion by the
Devil or
evil spirits,
[10][11] or that sneezing was the body's effort to force out an invading evil presence.
[9] In these cases, "God bless you" or "bless you" is used as a sort of
shield against evil. The Irish Folk story "Master and Man" by
Thomas Crofton Croker, collected by
William Butler Yeats, describes this variation.
[12]Moreover, in the past some people may have thought that the heart stops beating during a sneeze, and that the phrase "God bless you" encourages the heart to continue beating.
[9][10][11]
In some cultures, sneezing is seen as a sign of good fortune or God's beneficence.
[9][13] As such, alternative
responses to sneezing sometimes adopted by English speakers are the German word
Gesundheit (meaning "health"), the Irish word sláinte (meaning "good health"), and the Spanish
salud.
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