When Mesopotamian, Egyptian, and Canaanite texts were first discovered and translated in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, scholars immediately noticed similarities with the Hebrew Bible. The excitement was enormous, and the comparisons were often uncritical. A series of famous lectures delivered in Berlin in 1902 heightened public awareness of the Mesopotamian tablets and spawned a movement called "Pan-Babylonianism," which argued that all world myths, both Old and New Testament, were simply versions of Babylonian mythology.[1] The stories of Jesus in the Gospels were said to be based on the Gilgamesh Epic, and the passion of Christ was traced to Marduk mythology. Similar patterns emerged after the discovery of Ugarit in 1928, when scholars rushed to propose connections between Ugaritic religion and various ancient Near Eastern cultures, showing little concern for differences in historical setting, chronology, function, or literary genre.[2]
The Disease of Overdoing Similarities
In 1962, Samuel Sandmel delivered his presidential address to the Society of Biblical Literature under the title "Parallelomania." He defined this coinage as "that extravagance among scholars which first overdoes the supposed similarity in passages and then proceeds to describe source and derivation as if implying literary connection flowing in an inevitable or predetermined direction."[3] Sandmel's critique targeted a specific habit of mind in which scholars would extract passages from their literary contexts, place them side by side, and declare one dependent on the other without adequate justification. The similarities between texts, he insisted, were sometimes real, sometimes illusory, and sometimes a product of reading excerpts in isolation rather than attending to how each text functioned within its own larger framework.
The address was not a call to abandon comparative work. Sandmel was careful to acknowledge that genuine literary relationships do exist between ancient texts, and that the scholarly task of identifying them remains important. His concern was with the method by which such claims were made, particularly the tendency to leap from observed similarity to assumed dependence without passing through the intermediate steps of careful analysis. As he put it, "in dealing with similarities we can sometimes discover exact parallels, some with and some devoid of significance; seeming parallels which are so only imperfectly; and statements which can be called parallels only by taking them out of context."[4] The problem was not the existence of textual relationships, but the extravagance of what scholars did with them.
The Overcorrection
Sandmel's warning proved effective, perhaps more effective than he intended. In the decades following his address, a notable caution settled over certain areas of biblical scholarship, and some investigators became reluctant to pursue comparative work at all. This reaction has been described as "parallelophobia," and it has been observed that scholars moved from one extreme to the other, from overstressing the similarities between texts to downplaying them to the point of ignoring clear, informative connections.[5] Two extreme positions emerged from this dynamic. Those on one side interpreted the Bible through the lens of ancient Near Eastern texts at every turn, while those on the other dismissed the comparative material as irrelevant for biblical interpretation entirely.
The fear of being charged with parallelomania had a chilling effect on certain lines of inquiry. One study of the Pseudepigrapha and the New Testament notes that "owing to his strong warning, some scholars might have become so nervous about being charged with parallelomania that they might have been discouraged from undertaking studies on parallels that may be significant, although this was not Sandmel's intent."[6] The charge, in other words, became a rhetorical weapon capable of shutting down comparative inquiry before it had a chance to make its case, which was the opposite of what Sandmel had argued for.
A similar oscillation played out in the study of Ugaritic religion, where early scholarship swung between two equally narrow approaches. One camp saw connections everywhere between Ugaritic and Israelite religion, while another used the Ugaritic material primarily as a foil to underscore the superiority of biblical religion, reducing a magnificent culture to the status of a handmaid of biblical studies.[7] Neither approach served the texts well, and it took several generations for a more balanced methodology to emerge.
The Contextual Method
Out of this tension, a more moderate position developed in the form of what has been called the "contextual approach," which seeks to identify and discuss both similarities and differences between the Bible and the texts of the ancient Near East. Rather than finding the key to every biblical phenomenon in some ancient Near Eastern precedent, the goal of this approach is "to silhouette the biblical text against its wider literary and cultural environment," recognizing that ancient Israel was part of its surrounding world without reducing its literature to a mere adaptation of its neighbors' traditions.[8] This approach recognizes that the peoples of the ancient Near East shared many cultural concepts, including ideas about family, life, death, kingship, and the divine, not because one group necessarily borrowed from another, but because they participated in a common cultural milieu.
The contextual method represents a significant advance over both of the extremes that preceded it. Rather than asking only whether text A was copied from text B, it asks what light each text sheds on the other when both are understood within their shared cultural environment. Similarities may reflect direct borrowing, or they may reflect a common tradition, a shared literary convention, or the simple fact that people living in proximity often think about similar problems in similar ways. The method does not prejudge the answer; it begins with careful description of each text on its own terms and only then asks what, if anything, the comparison reveals.
Intertextuality's Contribution
Intertextual methodology brings additional precision to this middle ground by distinguishing among different types of textual relationships and developing criteria for evaluating them. Rather than treating all similarities as undifferentiated "parallels," intertextual analysis draws distinctions between quotations (where one text reproduces the language of another, sometimes with an introductory formula like "as it is written"), allusions (where an author intentionally evokes an earlier text through shared language or imagery, expecting the audience to recognize the reference), and echoes (subtler resonances that may or may not reflect conscious intention).[9] These categories are not rigid, and scholars disagree about where the boundaries fall, but the basic framework prevents the kind of undifferentiated comparison that Sandmel rightly criticized.
The development of criteria for identifying these relationships has been one of the most significant contributions of intertextual scholarship. A widely adopted framework proposes seven criteria for evaluating proposed echoes of Scripture, including availability (whether the source text was accessible to the author), volume (the degree of verbal repetition), recurrence (whether the same source is evoked elsewhere in the context), thematic coherence (whether the proposed connection fits the argument), and historical plausibility (whether the author and audience could have recognized the reference).[10] These criteria do not produce certainty, and they cannot be assigned numerical values and added up to determine mechanically whether a connection is genuine. They function instead as a set of disciplined questions that guard against both overconfidence and excessive caution, providing a framework for making probabilistic judgments about whether a proposed textual relationship is likely, possible, or unlikely.
This graduated approach to evidence is precisely what distinguishes intertextual methodology from the parallelomania that Sandmel diagnosed. When a scholar proposes that one text alludes to another, the claim can be evaluated against established criteria rather than simply asserted or dismissed. The criteria make it possible to say that some proposed connections are well supported by evidence while others remain speculative, and to explain why. They also make it possible to recognize that textual relationships exist on a spectrum, from explicit quotation (where the evidence is strong) to faint echo (where it is weaker), without insisting that every connection be either certain or nonexistent.
Beyond Direct Dependence
Perhaps the most important way intertextual methodology navigates between parallelomania and parallelophobia is by expanding the range of relationships it can describe. The older comparative approach tended to assume that if two texts were similar, one must have been derived from the other, and the scholarly task was to determine the direction of dependence. This assumption is precisely what made parallelomania so tempting, since every observed similarity became a potential case of borrowing. Intertextual analysis, by contrast, recognizes that texts can be related in ways that do not require direct literary dependence.[11] Two texts may share vocabulary, imagery, or narrative patterns because they draw on a common tradition, because they address similar situations using the language and concepts available in their cultural environment, or because one has shaped the broader literary culture in which the other was produced, even without a direct line of transmission.
This broader view of textual relationships does not mean that anything goes. The criteria for identifying genuine intertextual connections still apply, and some proposed relationships remain more convincing than others. What it acknowledges is that the ancient literary world was more complex than a simple model of source and derivation can capture. Authors did not always work by copying directly from a text in front of them; they sometimes worked from memory, from oral tradition, from shared liturgical language, or from a general familiarity with a body of literature that shaped their vocabulary and patterns of thought. Recognizing this complexity makes it possible to discuss textual relationships honestly, neither claiming more than the evidence supports nor ignoring connections that illuminate how ancient texts were produced and understood.
The shift from asking "did author A copy from text B?" to asking "what is the nature of the relationship between these texts?" represents a fundamental reorientation in how comparative work is done. It does not resolve every dispute, and scholars will continue to disagree about individual cases, but it provides a framework in which those disagreements can be conducted productively, with attention to evidence and method rather than mere assertion.