See hewers of wood and drawers of water on Wiktionary
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"etymology_text": "A biblical term, first mentioned in Joshua 9:21 (but compare Deuteronomy 29:10).",
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"ref": "1611, The Holy Bible, […] (King James Version), London: […] Robert Barker, […], →OCLC, Joshua 9:21, column 1:",
"text": "And the Princes ſaid vnto them, Let them liue, (but let them bee hewers of wood, and drawers of water, vnto all the Congregation,) as the Princes had promiſed them.",
"type": "quote"
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"ref": "1611, The Holy Bible, […] (King James Version), London: […] Robert Barker, […], →OCLC, Joshua 9:23, column 1:",
"text": "Now therefore ye are curſed, and there ſhall none of you bee freed from being bondmen, and hewers of wood, and drawers of water, for the houſe of my God.",
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"ref": "1611, The Holy Bible, […] (King James Version), London: […] Robert Barker, […], →OCLC, Joshua 9:27, column 1:",
"text": "And Ioſhua made them that day, hewers of wood, and drawers of water for the Congregation, and for the Altar of the Lord, euen vnto this day, in the place which he ſhould chooſe.",
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"ref": "1991, Martin Ohaeri Ijere, Women in Nigerian Economy, page 41:",
"text": "All these groups are among the hewers of wood and drawers of water whom Marx assured that they would have nothing but their chains to lose if they rose against their oppressors.",
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"Those who drudge, or are made to work hard; those who do menial or servile work at the behest of others; physical labourers."
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"ref": "1611, The Holy Bible, […] (King James Version), London: […] Robert Barker, […], →OCLC, Joshua 9:23, column 1:",
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"ref": "1611, The Holy Bible, […] (King James Version), London: […] Robert Barker, […], →OCLC, Joshua 9:27, column 1:",
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Download raw JSONL data for hewers of wood and drawers of water meaning in All languages combined (2.3kB)
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This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable All languages combined dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2025-01-31 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2025-01-20 using wiktextract (bcd5c38 and 9dbd323). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.
If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.