A Restoration parody became falsely attributed to the Bible

Evidence

What Butler does, in Hudibras, is parody. He is taking a cliché — a thing every English-speaking reader of his moment will recognize as proverbial — and he is deploying it for a joke about love. The joke depends on the cliché already being a cliché. The line is not introducing the idea. The line is making fun of it. … But here is what happened next. Hudibras was a huge bestseller. It was the comedic hit of the Restoration. The king laughed at it. Pepys read it. Dryden praised it. Within twenty years, the neatness of Butler’s couplet — spare the rod, and spoil the child — seven syllables, two stressed monosyllables, a clean rhetorical flip — had entered the language as a freestanding aphorism. People stopped quoting Hudibras. They started quoting the line. And — because the line scanned like a Bible verse — they started, slowly, attributing it to the Bible. — , The Rod and the Child, 242

Categorization

• SEED: Angle for an essay: how metrically elegant language drifts into misattribution — the rhythm of a line as a mechanism for its false sacralization.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: are there other famous ‘biblical’ or ‘proverbial’ lines that are actually literary inventions that scan like scripture?