"Ring Around the Rosies"

Ring around the rosies,

A pocket full of posies,

Ashes, ashes

We all fall down!

If you are like me, you sang this song on the elementary school playground at recess. As I began to write this article, my eight year old son assured me that children in 2010 proudly continue the tradition. My favorite part of the rhyme was when we collapsed into the grass (although my mom was not very fond of cleaning the grass stains from my trousers).

A little known fact is that a number of medieval scholars attribute the song’s words to the “Black Death” that ravaged Europe in the fourteenth century.[1] The Bubonic Plague killed 20 million people, roughly a third of the continent’s population. Here is a description of what each line may refer to:

“Ring around the rosies”: A red mark, sometimes the first sign of the plague

“A pocket full of posies”: Herbs that people carried to ward off the disease

“Ashes, ashes”: Perhaps a reference to cremation or the words that the priest spoke at the Funeral Mass. A variant of this line reads “Atischoo, Atischoo,” which appears to allude to the sneezing that accompanied the plague.

“We all fall down”: The Black Death killed people regardless of their age or their social status

If the above explanation is true, what a strange song to sing - - it ranks right up there with “Rockabye Baby.” To think that young children unknowingly utter such sinister words at playtime!

The fact of the matter is that many also view sin as a harmless activity when actually it is as horrid as “Ring around the Rosies.” Sometimes people wonder why God has given us such a large number of rules in the Bible. The answer is not because He is a strict authoritarian, but because sin is dangerous to us. God loves us and wants to protect us from its disastrous consequences. Here are a few examples of His warnings:

5:3 For the lips of an adulteress drip honey and smoother than oil is her speech; 
5:4 But in the end she is bitter as wormwood, sharp as a two-edged sword. (Proverbs 5:3-4)

Bread obtained by falsehood is sweet to a man, But afterward his mouth will be filled with gravel. (Proverbs 20:17)

There is a way which seems right to a man, But its end is the way of death. (Proverbs 16:25)

The next time you see a commandment in the Bible, take a moment to thank God that He loves us enough to place these warnings in the Bible so that He might protect us from that which would destroy us!  

[1] Norman F. Cantor, In the Wake of the Plague: The Black Death and the World it Made (New York: Harper Perennial, 2002), 5-6.