Texts in Conversation
Sirach quotes Exodus 34 to ground its view of mercy as a central statement about God’s character. Sirach presents its teaching as a continuation of Israel’s wisdom and theological tradition with the same authority.
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2500 BCE
1000+ CE
Exodus 34:6
Hebrew Bible
5 The Lord descended in the cloud and stood with him there and proclaimed the Lord by name. 6 The Lord passed by before him and proclaimed: “The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, and abounding in loyal love and faithfulness, 7 keeping loyal love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin. But he by no means leaves the guilty unpunished, responding to the transgression of fathers by dealing with children and children’s children, to the third and fourth generation.”
Date: 750–400 BCE (based on scholarly estimates)
Sirach 2:11
Ben Sira, Ecclesiasticus
Deuterocanon
10 Look at the generations of old, and see: Who ever put his trust in the Lord, and was ashamed? Or who remained in his fear, and was forsaken? Or who called upon him, and he neglected him? 11 For the Lord is full of compassion and mercy. He forgives sins and saves in time of affliction. 12 Woe to fearful hearts, to faint hands, and to the sinner who goes two ways!
Date: 195–180 BCE (based on scholarly estimates)
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Notes and References
"... In the reader-oriented approach, any marker can trigger a connection between texts, and readers are free to pursue any type of intertextual relationship they wish. For example, the theme of fire might induce an interpreter to read the story of “strange fire” in Leviticus 10 with passages about immolating children in the Book of Jeremiah, without implying that the latter borrowed from the former or vice versa ... The author-oriented approach, however, works on the principle that the author has purposely embedded markers in the alluding text, and the reader’s goal is to identify those markers and construe the alluding text in light of the evoked one. Authors have three main options at their disposal for creating such markers: explicit citation, direct allusion, and implicit allusion. (In addition, a text may sometimes employ an unmarked citation, as when Sirach 2:11 quotes Exodus 34:6, or when Sirach 24:23 cites Deuteronomy 33:4) ..."
Geoffrey David Miller, “Methodological Reflections for Future Intertextual Studies,” in Intertextual Explorations in Deuterocanonical and Cognate Literature, ed. Jeremy Corley and Geoffrey David Miller (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2019), 319–343.
* The use of references are not endorsements of their contents. Please read the entirety of the provided reference(s) to understand the author's full intentions regarding the use of these texts.
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