Texts rarely exist in isolation. A written composition, once produced, enters a wider literary environment where later authors can encounter it, engage with it, and respond to it in their own writings. Over time, the accumulation of those responses, the ways successive communities read, interpret, and repurpose an earlier text, constitutes what is known as reception history: the record of how a text is understood across different periods and settings. Biblical studies offers an especially rich field for tracing reception history because the textual record spans several thousand years, from the earliest compositions of the ancient Near East through the Hebrew Bible and into the many traditions that grow out of it. Understanding how that record works, however, requires a closer look at the specific literary mechanisms through which later texts engage with earlier ones, and at what those engagements can and cannot tell us about how communities actually read the material they inherit.
The most important of those mechanisms is the phenomenon of textual borrowing, instances where a later text incorporates, echoes, adapts, or reworks language and content from an earlier one. In contemporary literary study, this phenomenon is known to encompass a wide range of relationships between texts, from direct quotation to structural imitation to faint verbal echoes that a reader may or may not recognize [1]. A critical distinction within this range concerns authorial intent. Some intertextual connections are the product of deliberate engagement: an author consciously quotes, revises, or responds to a known source. Others may be coincidental, arising from shared vocabulary, conventional phrasing, or overlapping subject matter without any direct literary relationship. This distinction matters because the two types of connection carry very different implications. A coincidental verbal overlap tells us relatively little about how anyone understands the earlier text, but a deliberate act of borrowing, one where the later author is knowingly working with specific source material, is itself an act of interpretation. It records, in the texture of the new composition, how that author and community read the old one.
This is the point at which intertextuality and reception history converge. When a later text intentionally engages an earlier one, the way it handles that source, what it preserves, what it changes, what it emphasizes or omits, becomes primary evidence for how the earlier text is received. Reception history, in other words, is not something that can only be reconstructed from commentaries, translations, or secondary discussions about a text; it is frequently embedded in the derivative texts themselves, in the specific choices their authors make when reworking inherited material. The literary cultures of the ancient Near East operate this way as a matter of course. Scribal education involves the memorization and internalization of authoritative compositions, and scribes trained on older texts draw on them when producing new ones [2]. The Gilgamesh Epic, for example, passes through Sumerian, Old Babylonian, and Standard Babylonian versions over roughly two thousand years, with each stage of transmission introducing new material and reframing the theology of what comes before [3]. Each version of the epic is both a literary composition in its own right and a document of how the previous version is received and understood.
The Hebrew Bible participates in this same pattern at multiple levels. Its authors and editors work within the literary world of the ancient Near East and adapt its conventions — the covenant structure of Deuteronomy, for instance, closely mirrors the format of ancient Near Eastern treaties, particularly Assyrian loyalty oaths from the seventh century BCE [4]. But the Hebrew Bible also exhibits extensive intertextuality within its own pages: the book of Deuteronomy revisits and updates legal material from Exodus, the books of Chronicles retell the history found in Samuel and Kings with significant changes in emphasis, and later prophets rework the language and imagery of earlier ones in new historical circumstances [5]. In each case, the later text's handling of its source, what it chooses to preserve, revise, or reinterpret, documents how the earlier material is read at the time of composition. The Hebrew Bible is, in this sense, not only a source for later reception history but already a product of it, with each successive layer of writing recording its community's interpretation of what comes before.
The traditions that grow out of the Hebrew Bible during the Second Temple period illustrate this relationship between intertextuality and reception history with particular clarity. The Dead Sea Scrolls, composed between roughly the third century BCE and the first century CE, include texts that walk through prophetic books passage by passage, applying each line to the community's own history and its expectations for the future [6]. These interpretive commentaries are, by definition, reception-historical documents: they record in writing exactly how a specific community reads specific biblical texts at a specific moment in time. Other Second Temple compositions take a different approach, retelling and expanding biblical narratives while presenting the result as a continuation of the same authoritative tradition rather than a departure from it. The book of Jubilees, for example, retells much of Genesis and Exodus with significant additions while framing itself as a revelation given to Moses at Sinai — a literary strategy that claims continuity with the source tradition even as it reinterprets it [7]. In both cases, the intertextual relationship between the new text and its biblical source is intentional and traceable, and therefore constitutes direct evidence of reception.
The same principle applies to the two major interpretive traditions that emerge from Second Temple Judaism. The writings of the New Testament engage the Hebrew Bible through direct quotation but also through subtler echoes, images, and narrative patterns, connections that assume a reader will recognize the older text beneath the surface of the new one [8]. Where these connections reflect deliberate authorial engagement with a biblical source, they document how early Christian communities understand the Hebrew Bible and what role it plays in their theology. Rabbinic literature operates similarly, generating its interpretive readings through sustained attention to tensions, gaps, and apparent contradictions within the biblical text, always guided by the interpretive commitments of the rabbinic community [9]. Both traditions inherit a Bible that is already accompanied by centuries of accumulated interpretation, visible across the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Septuagint, Philo, Josephus, and the earliest rabbinic sources, and each tradition's particular way of engaging that inherited text constitutes a further chapter in its reception history [10].
Reception history and intertextuality, then, are not identical concepts, but they overlap in a specific and productive way. Intertextuality describes the full range of relationships between texts, including connections that may be unintentional or perceived only by later readers. Reception history traces how a text is actually understood over time. The two converge whenever a later author deliberately engages an earlier text, because the choices made in that engagement, what is quoted, what is altered, what is recontextualized, constitute a concrete record of reading. The textual tradition that runs from the earliest literature of the ancient Near East, through the Hebrew Bible, through the Dead Sea Scrolls and into the foundational writings of Christianity and rabbinic Judaism, is built on precisely this kind of deliberate engagement at every stage. Each generation of authors receives a body of authoritative texts and produces new compositions that rework them, and each act of reworking preserves, in its details, a record of how those earlier texts are understood. The history of reading, in this tradition, is inseparable from the history of writing.