In one version Dives asks Lazarus (who is apparently unable to help him) for a drop of water, and complains about his eternal punishment.
The story contains some miraculous elements, and has its emphasis slightly changed from the more traditionally Jewish to a more popularly Western Christian view of the afterlife.
As in other popular renderings of the parable, Dives (Latin for rich or splendid) was considered as a proper name, and the name even was changed to Diverus in variant B.
[6] In Popular Music of the Olden Time (1855), William Chappell gives the following information about the melody: This is the tune of many songs.
Lucy Broadwood wrote that the musicologist Alfred James Hipkins had known the tune for years and called it "Lazarus", but did not know the lyrics.
An elderly woman in Westminster, London, in 1892 reportedly recognised the tune Hipkins knew as belonging to a song about the Lazarus parable.
Broadwood matched a typical version of the lyrics to "Dives and Lazarus" with this tune attested by Hipkins and the lady from Westminster, stating that "they suit it so well that there is a great probability of their having at one time been associated together".
He quoted the tune in his popular English Folk Song Suite (1923) and later used it as the basis of his Five Variants of Dives and Lazarus (1939).