The biblical tradition was built by imaginative readers. The prophets read the Torah and saw their own circumstances reflected in it, the apocalyptic visionaries read the prophets and constructed new worlds of meaning from their imagery, the rabbinic tradition developed midrash as a disciplined practice of drawing new meaning from familiar passages, and the authors of the New Testament read all of it and perceived patterns that earlier readers had not yet seen. At every stage, later writers treated earlier scriptures not as closed statements with fixed meanings but as living texts whose significance could be extended, recombined, and reshaped in response to new events and new questions. This impulse to read creatively across texts is not incidental to the biblical tradition; it is one of the principal mechanisms by which the tradition developed.
Intertextuality, as a way of studying these relationships, gives a name to something that readers have always done. It recognizes that texts do not exist in isolation, that every passage enters a world already populated by other texts, and that readers inevitably bring their wider literary knowledge to bear on what they are reading. Rather than treating this as a problem to be controlled, intertextuality treats it as the primary way that texts generate meaning, and it invites readers into the kind of attentive, creative engagement that produced the biblical tradition in the first place.
Reading Between Texts
The concept of intertextuality emerged in part from the recognition that no text exists in isolation. Every piece of writing enters a world already populated by other texts, and every reader brings to the act of reading a network of associations, echoes, and memories drawn from what they have read before. This is not a deficiency to be corrected but a fundamental feature of how language and literature work. Meaning does not reside exclusively inside a single text, sealed there by the author; it also emerges in the space between texts, activated by readers who notice connections and follow them.[1]
This insight has consequences for how we think about the relationship between exegesis (reading meaning out of a text) and eisegesis (reading meaning into it). From an intertextual perspective, the traditional opposition between the two proves less stable than it first appears, because the connections a reader perceives between texts are themselves part of the meaning-making process. The question shifts from whether readers should bring other texts to bear on their interpretation to whether they do so with care, knowledge, and attention to the texts involved.[2]
Matthew Reads Hosea
Matthew's use of Hosea 11:1 is one of the most vivid examples of this kind of creative engagement. In its original context, the Hosea passage is unambiguously retrospective, opening with "When Israel was a young man, I loved him like a son, and I summoned my son out of Egypt." The verses that follow describe Israel's disobedience and God's anguished response. There is no prediction here, no forward-looking oracle about a future messiah. What Matthew perceives in this text is not what Hosea intended but a pattern in God's dealings with Israel that the story of Jesus recapitulates and brings to a new fulfillment.[3]
Writing to a Jewish audience, Matthew would have been working within a well-established interpretive tradition in which earlier scriptures served as raw material for understanding new events. The disagreement between Matthew and contemporaries who did not share his conclusions was not about whether this kind of reading was legitimate; it was about the specific claim that Jesus was the one who embodied these patterns. The method itself, reading creatively within a tradition, was common ground.
Metalepsis and the Invitation to Read Beyond
When a biblical author quotes or alludes to an earlier text, the reference often functions as an entry point into a larger context that is not explicitly cited but is assumed to be active in the reader's mind. This technique, sometimes called metalepsis, uses a part of a precursor text to evoke the whole of it, so that a quoted fragment carries with it the weight of its original setting, characters, and narrative arc. Reading a metalepsis well requires following the echo back to its source and considering what the broader context contributes to the later author's meaning.[4]
This is a fundamentally reader-dependent process, and that is precisely the point. The metaleptic link between two texts only activates when a reader recognizes the allusion and follows it, and different readers will follow these links to different depths depending on their familiarity with the precursor text. Texts that operate this way are designed to reward attentive readers who bring a wide knowledge of the literary tradition to their reading. Those who know the broader context of Hosea 11, for instance, will perceive in Matthew's quotation not just a surface-level parallel but a contrast between Israel's disobedience after the exodus and Jesus' obedience, a layer of meaning that opens up only for readers willing to look beyond the words immediately on the page.
Daniel Reimagines Jeremiah
This kind of creative engagement with earlier scripture is not limited to the New Testament. One of the most transparent examples within the Hebrew Bible itself occurs in Daniel 9, where the author takes a specific prophecy from Jeremiah about the duration of the Babylonian exile and transforms it into something Jeremiah never envisioned. Jeremiah had declared that the nations would serve the king of Babylon for seventy years, after which God would punish Babylon for its iniquity (Jeremiah 25:11–12). The author of Daniel, writing centuries later during the crisis of the Antiochene persecution, takes Jeremiah's seventy years and reimagines them as seventy weeks of years (490 years), extending the prophetic timeline and applying it to the events of his own era.[5]
In the Qumran community, this impulse toward imaginative rereading took institutional form in the pesher commentaries, which treat the words of the prophets as mysteries whose true referents are not the events of the prophet's own time but the experiences of the community in the present. The statement "for the wicked surround the righteous" in Habakkuk 1:4, for example, is interpreted as referring to the Wicked Priest and the Teacher of Righteousness, figures from the community's own history. This approach draws on the same interpretive logic that governs dream interpretation in the book of Daniel, where symbolic images are decoded as referring to realities beyond their surface appearance.[6]
The Apocalyptic Imagination
Apocalyptic literature represents perhaps the most sustained example of imaginative reading in the ancient world, because the entire genre is built on the creative reinterpretation of earlier scriptural traditions. The rise of apocalyptic prophecy in Israel involved the formation of new visions from allusions to an existing sacred corpus, combining elements from prophecy, wisdom, and priestly traditions into something that none of those sources contained on their own. Apocalyptic visionaries reached into earlier texts, especially prophetic oracles, and drew out meanings that extended far beyond the original compositional setting, forging what has been described as a "compelling new imagination from allusions to the corpus."[7]
Isaiah 24–27, for example, reaches into earlier texts such as Hosea 4:9, Amos 5:2, and Isaiah 17:6 and extends them in ways that their original authors could not have anticipated, building a vision of cosmic transformation and resurrection from the raw materials of earlier prophecy. The same process is visible throughout the Enochic literature, in Jubilees' creative retelling of Genesis, and in the way the book of Revelation weaves together imagery from Daniel, Ezekiel, and the prophets into a new literary whole. In every case, the later author reads the earlier text not as a closed and finished statement but as a living source of meaning that can be reshaped, combined, and extended in response to new circumstances and new questions.
Midrash as Disciplined Imagination
The rabbinic tradition formalized this kind of imaginative engagement into an entire literary and interpretive culture. In Biblical Hebrew, the verb d-r-sh means "to seek," and midrash, its derived noun, became the primary rabbinic term for exegesis. Traditional midrash is characterized by close reading of the biblical text, but it is also mystical, imaginative, and revelatory, interpreting not only the text before the reader but the text behind and beyond the words on the page. In rabbinic thinking, each letter and the spaces between the letters are available for interpretive work, and midrash is rarely comprehensive, raising as many questions as it answers.[8]
The midrashic tradition granted interpreters considerable freedom. The midrashist "could add, deviate from, change or permute the tradition he had received," and much of midrash was expansive, filling in scriptural gaps, developing characters' biographies, supplying missing dialogue, and offering motivation for unexplained actions. Because so much of this work appears creative, the poet David Curzon has defined midrash as "rabbinic flights of interpretive imagination," and this definition captures something essential about the practice.[9] The anthologies of these imaginative readings span more than a millennium, and the rabbis who produced them were fond of analogies, puns, parables, and anachronisms, all in the service of making ancient texts speak to new situations.[10] What made midrash disciplined rather than arbitrary was not a restriction on creativity but a deep commitment to the text itself and to the communal traditions of interpretation that surrounded it. The freedom to reimagine was always exercised within a framework of reverence for the words being interpreted.