Isaiah 66:24

Hebrew Bible

22 “For just as the new heavens and the new earth I am about to make will remain standing before me,” says the Lord, “so your descendants and your name will remain. 23 From one month to the next and from one Sabbath to the next, all people will come to worship me,” says the Lord. 24They will go out and observe the corpses of those who rebelled against me, for the maggots that eat them will not die, and the fire that consumes them will not die out. All people will find the sight abhorrent.

2 Maccabees 9:9

Deuterocanon

7 Yet he did not in any way stop his insolence, but was even more filled with arrogance, breathing fire in his rage against the Jews, and giving orders to drive even faster. And so it came about that he fell out of his chariot as it was rushing along, and the fall was so hard as to torture every limb of his body. 8 Thus he who only a little while before had thought in his superhuman arrogance that he could command the waves of the sea, and had imagined that he could weigh the high mountains in a balance, was brought down to earth and carried in a litter, making the power of God manifest to all. 9 And so the ungodly man's body swarmed with worms, and while he was still living in anguish and pain, his flesh rotted away, and because of the stench the whole army felt revulsion at his decay. 10 Because of his intolerable stench no one was able to carry the man who a little while before had thought that he could touch the stars of heaven. 11 Then it was that, broken in spirit, he began to lose much of his arrogance and to come to his senses under the scourge of God, for he was tortured with pain every moment.

 Notes and References

"... A final function of intertextuality is the artful allusion to an earlier work but without exegetical repercussions. Sommer labels this type “echo,” although he deviates from Richard Hays’s use of the same term. For Sommer, an echo evokes an earlier text in the mind of the reader or listener and nothing more. They have “the pleasure of recognition” but are not guided in any way to proceed further; they merely appreciate the literary artistry in its own right. The audience therefore moves through steps one and two of the intertextual process, recognizing the marker and the evoked text, but they stop before proceeding to step three since there is no discernible significance beyond the echoing of the earlier text. The intertextual link is not a coincidental resemblance to an earlier text, for it meets several or all of the criteria enumerated above for proving author-oriented intertextuality, but it does nothing to elucidate or react against the antecedent text. It is merely there for the audience’s enjoyment. A possible example of such an echo is Judith’s exclamation that God will punish Israel’s gentile foes and “will send fire and worms into their flesh” (Judith 16:17), echoing Isaiah’s description of the horrid state of those who rebel against Yahweh, where “their worm shall not die, and their fire shall not be extinguished” (Isaiah 66:24). Apart from the skillful borrowing of these Isaian images, there is probably no clear purpose to the intertextual connection. (Although Judith 16:17 employs prophetic language, there may be an allusion to the fate of Antiochus Epiphanes, struck with worms as a divine punishment in 2 Maccabees 9:9) ..."

Miller, Geoffrey David "Methodological Reflections for Future Intertextual Studies" in Corley, Jeremy, and Geoffrey David Miller (eds.) Intertextual Explorations in Deuterocanonical and Cognate Literature (pp. 319-343) De Gruyter, 2019

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