Pete Hegseth delivered a prayer at a Pentagon worship service on Wednesday that he said was based on the Old Testament book of Ezekiel, but the words he used appeared to echo a famous passage from Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction.
Hegseth read, “The path of the downed aviator is beset on all sides by the iniquities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men,” language that closely tracks the speech Samuel L. Jackson’s character Jules Winnfield delivers in the 1994 film before executing a crooked business partner of his mob boss. The Bible verse he invoked, Ezekiel 25:17, reads: “And I will execute great vengeance upon them with furious rebukes; and they shall know that I am the Lord, when I shall lay my vengeance upon them.”
The prayer was read to crews that rescued an Air Force colonel from an Iranian mountain this month after his fighter jet was shot down, part of a set of Pentagon worship services described as being held to bless the Iran war effort. That context made the choice of words more striking: Hegseth presented the prayer as Scripture-based, and in some accounts he acknowledged only the verse from Ezekiel, yet the phrasing matched Jackson’s Pulp Fiction monologue more closely than the Bible text itself.
Jackson’s character says, “The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the iniquities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men,” followed by, “Blessed is he who, in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother’s keeper and the finder of lost children,” before adding, “And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers,” and, “And you will know my name is the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon you.” The sequence appeared in 1994 and has become one of the film’s most recognizable scenes.
The tension is not whether Hegseth quoted Ezekiel at all. It is that the prayer he delivered to bless a war effort looked less like a Bible recitation than a repurposed movie speech, leaving the scriptural claim far thinner than the language he actually used.