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• ALoafOfBread@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  Seems maybe to come originally fromsome guy’s interpretation of an Arab interpretation of the passage:

  H.C. Trumbull contrasts the expression with a comparison of blood and milk in the Arab world:

  We, in the West, are accustomed to say that “blood is thicker than water”; but the Arabs have the idea that blood is thicker than milk, than a mother’s milk. With them, any two children nourished at the same breast are called “milk-brothers,” or “sucking brothers”; and the tie between such is very strong. […] But the Arabs hold that brothers in the covenant of blood are closer than brothers at a common breast; that those who have tasted each other’s blood are in a surer covenant than those who have tasted the same milk together; that “blood-lickers,” as the blood-brothers are sometimes called, are more truly one than “milk-brothers,” or “sucking brothers”; that, indeed, blood is thicker than milk, as well as thicker than water.[16]

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