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Agree with DC. The word "know" is used in the Bible in the both the traditional sense of knowledge (Genesis 4:9: "And the LORD said unto Cain, Where is Abel thy brother? And he said, I know not: Am I my brother's keeper?"); and in the sexual euphamism sense; but to "know someone in the biblical sense" refers only to sex. bd2412T13:56, 11 April 2012 (UTC)Reply
Was he? I think the point is valid; certainly to a non-English speaker the phrase as a whole would be a mystery, as it requires prior familiarity with its meaning to be comprehensible. Certainly it is counterintuitive. If you told a person who was unfamliar with the phrase that you would like to "know them in the biblical sense" they would probably assume that you wanted to pray with them or engage in other religious activity. bd2412T14:19, 11 April 2012 (UTC)Reply
Although I haven't actually voted here, I agree with those below who find the entry for in the biblical sense to provide a satisfactory resolution to this question. I would redirect this title there. bd2412T21:42, 17 April 2012 (UTC)Reply
Keep, I think; the know-less use of in the biblical sense(“sexually; *wink*; if you know what I mean”) — b.g.c. finds nonce-usages with "marry", "be with", "take possession of", and "have", among others — suggests to me that this phrase has taken on a life of its own. (Besides, the KJV uses the word "know" in lots of ways; the very first occurrence seems to be Genesis 3:7, " they knew that they naked; ", which despite the nakedness is just the ordinary modern sense of "know".) —RuakhTALK15:28, 11 April 2012 (UTC)Reply
(Original poster of the entry) Keep No-one would read "Alice knew Bob" in a contemporary text as meaning "Alice had sex with Bob", even if the word was in a sexual context ("Alice and Bob were members of a swingers club, and knew each other" would not be read as implying they had sex). "in the biblical sense" is therefore not just a clarifier (in the way that "in the literal sense" would be for something like decimate), it's part of a phrase that's fundamentally divorced from the word "know" as it's currently understood. I think this passes the fried egg test. Smurrayinchester (talk) 16:26, 11 April 2012 (UTC)Reply
It looks like a weird entry title being 6 words long, but I don't see how to decompose it into parts (by adding definitions to know, biblical, etc.) to make it sum of parts. Ergo, keep. Mglovesfun (talk) 16:59, 11 April 2012 (UTC)Reply
I don't much like entries that contain the word "someone". You could add "someone" or "something" to any transitive verb. Could it be changed to "know in the biblical sense"? 86.179.113.10217:05, 11 April 2012 (UTC)Reply
If the full phrase is deemed idiomatic, I would like to know whether attestable terms ending in "X in the 'y' sense" where 'y' is something like a context or topic are all includable. Or is it just if there is some complication like double entendre, irony, or humor involved? DCDuringTALK18:55, 11 April 2012 (UTC)Reply
My "keep" vote, at least, was based on much more than double entendre, irony, and humor: it was based on specific evidence that this set phrase has been reanalyzed as an idiom. You can dispute that evidence, of course, but I don't think you can claim that it applies equally to a wide class of entries. —RuakhTALK19:11, 11 April 2012 (UTC)Reply
Are you sure that has the relevant "sexual/carnal" meaning? I can't see that actual page, but overall the book seems to have a strong religious agenda, encouraging people to look at relationships in religious terms, and containing statements like "how many of us can honestly say we understand relationships from the biblical perspective". I think of "know in the biblical sense" to be a bit irreverent, a bit nudge-nudge-wink-wink. I'm not sure if it fits the tone of that book. 86.179.113.10201:52, 12 April 2012 (UTC)Reply
Quite so.
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Since we now have in the biblical sense, I'm going to change my vote to delete. "Know in the biblical sense" still seems subtly different from the "know" "in the biblical sense", largely because unlike "have", "met" or "make one's relationship official", "know" actually does have a biblical sense that is being referenced, but that's probably splitting hairs, since like I say, no-one would recognise this sense any more in contemporary writing without the "in a biblical sense" tag. I'm also not quite sure how this should be explained on the know page. Perhaps add to sense 7 something like "In contemporary use, usually indicated by biblically or in the biblical sense." Smurrayinchester (talk) 16:07, 12 April 2012 (UTC)Reply
The non-idiomatic usage of the term in the biblical sense in X in the biblical sense seems to be followed by an explicit definition of X, at least in the first use of X in the passage, section, or larger unit of writing. Very few uses of in the biblical sense occur without know. No OneLook reference has in the biblical sense, though three (really one) have know in the biblical sense, albeit only as a redirect. This seems to be one of the rare cases where we can find an appropriate lexical entry (in the biblical sense) to cover the construction generalizing from a core idiom (the know form). So, I lean toward keep.
One interesting aspect of the usage is that there are many citations of the challenged term that refer to another biblical sense of (deprecated template usage)know as also being "the" biblical sense. In those cases it seems to refer to a sense of know intentionally (mis?)applied to prevent any sexual sense from corrupting the children or women. DCDuringTALK16:49, 12 April 2012 (UTC)Reply
Keep. Definitely idiomatic. Few people are immediately familiar with the archaic sense of "know" being referenced here, and there is conceivably more than one way to "know" someone in a "sense" that might be deemed "biblical" (belonging to the same church?), so you can't really obtain the precise meaning of this set phrase ("to have sex with someone") by breaking the sum into its parts. Astral (talk) 22:51, 22 April 2012 (UTC)Reply
When the headword is a verb phrase, "one" refers to the subject (provided that the subject is generally expected to be human or at least animate), whereas "someone" refers to anyone else. (This is normal English usage in non-finite clauses without specific subjects or implied subjects: one might say "losing one's virginity should be a joyous thing", whereas "knowing one in the biblical sense should be a joyous thing" would mean something different, in that it assumes that some noun after the "one" is implied by the context.) When the headword is not a verb phrase, I think the two are generally more or less equivalent, and I'm not sure whether we have a standard one way or the other. —RuakhTALK14:40, 7 May 2012 (UTC)Reply
Keep, but I thought our convention was to replace person X in set phrases with “one”, not “someone” (frex, on this page: how one rolls, lose one's virginity). ~ Robin (talk) 11:43, 7 May 2012 (UTC)
