Readers often approach a text with the sense that it can be understood entirely on its own, but most writings draw from a much larger world of language, memory, and shared experience. Authors relied on familiar expressions and established ways of framing ideas, and they work within cultural settings where specific language and images already carry expected meaning. When this total environment is kept in view, a text begins to look less like an isolated piece of writing and more like one part of an ongoing conversation that stretches beyond its immediate setting.[1]
Intertextuality provides a way to study this larger conversation with more intention. Instead of focusing only on what a single text says, it examines how meaning takes shape when texts are read in relation to one another. Setting two writings side by side can show how an older theme is taken in a new direction, how a familiar image is used to address a different concern, or how two communities handle the same inherited traditions in contrasting ways. These comparisons do not depend on proving direct influence. They work because texts often participate in the same shared culture, carrying forward language and ideas that allow readers to see how traditions grow, adapt, or even break apart over time.[2]
Translation offers another place where this kind of work becomes helpful. Carrying a text into a new language is never neutral; translation is always a form of interpretation, shaped by the traditions and assumptions of the community doing the work. The Greek Septuagint and the Aramaic Targums illustrate this. Both were produced centuries after the earliest Hebrew writings, and both reflect how later readers understood and incorporated those traditions into their own. Some adjustments are modest, such as changes in a word or two that the translator thought would help clarify a difficult passage. Others reveal more dramatic choices, changing the underlying theology, emphasizing new or anachronistic ideas, or refining elements that no longer aligned with the translators’ expectations. These translations offer a view of how inherited traditions continued to develop, showing how cultural and theological perspectives guided the way well-known texts were presented to new audiences.
Because the texts live in these networks of language and tradition, intertextuality becomes a helpful way to make explicit what readers already do instinctively when they compare different writings. The word itself comes from literary theory, and some of the discussions around it can be intimidating, but the basic practice is straightforward. It asks readers to place two texts in conversation with each other and pay attention to what each one highlights about the other. The authors may never have known that their works would be compared, yet common themes, recurring images, and inherited patterns and traditions often emerge once the texts are read together. The goal is not to argue for direct influence; it is to observe how meaning becomes more visible when two writings are examined side by side.[3]
This way of reading may seem unfamiliar, but the biblical writings often reflect similar dynamics. Many passages build on older material, adapt traditional themes, or rely on stories that their audiences already knew. Later authors interpret inherited texts through their own circumstances, and translators do the same as they carry those texts into new languages and new communities. Once these layers are acknowledged, it becomes clear that meaning in the biblical tradition has always grown through relationships among texts. Intertextual reading makes that process more deliberate, helping readers see how ideas develop, shift, and take on new significance across time.