Numbers 15:38

Hebrew Bible

37 The Lord spoke to Moses: 38Speak to the Israelites and tell them to make tassels for themselves on the corners of their garments throughout their generations, and put a blue thread on the tassel of the corners. 39 You must have this tassel so that you may look at it and remember all the commandments of the Lord and obey them and so that you do not follow after your own heart and your own eyes that lead you to unfaithfulness.

Malachi 4:2

Hebrew Bible

1 “For indeed the day is coming, burning like a furnace, and all the arrogant evildoers will be chaff. The coming day will burn them up,” says the Lord of Heaven’s Armies. “It will not leave them even a root or branch. 2 But for you who respect my name, the sun of vindication will rise with healing wings, and you will skip about like calves released from the stall. 3 You will trample on the wicked, for they will be like ashes under the soles of your feet on the day that I am preparing,” says the Lord of Heaven’s Armies.

Matthew 9:20

New Testament

19 Jesus and his disciples got up and followed him. 20 But a woman who had been suffering from a hemorrhage for 12 years came up behind him and touched the edge of his cloak. 21 For she kept saying to herself, “If only I touch his cloak, I will be healed.” 22 But when Jesus turned and saw her he said, “Have courage, daughter! Your faith has made you well.” And the woman was healed from that hour.

 Notes and References

"... How does one identify allusions, understood as deliberate prompts to readers? The question has been much discussed of late, largely in response to Richard Hays’s work on scripture in Paul.15 Parallels can be the upshot of unconscious borrowing or coincidence or the common use of stock phrases, and a writer can use biblical language for its own sake, without any desire to recall a particular subtext. Moreover, diligent searching can always unearth parallels between two texts. Justin Martyr discovered resemblances between the Pentateuch and Plato and took them to establish the dependence of the latter upon the former; and almost every verse in the New Testament has been thought by someone to depend upon this or that Old Testament text. Theological libraries are full of unsubstantiated intertextual theories, and proposals are often hard to evaluate. John 1:51 (‘you will see heaven opened, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of man’) obviously has something to do with Jacob’s ladder and Genesis 28:12; but does Mark 10:45 (‘to give his life as a ransom for many’) draw upon Isaiah 53? Is Romans 8:32 (God ‘did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all’) a reminiscence of Genesis 22 and the offering up by Abraham of his son Isaac? Or, given that Jews spoke of the fringes of their garments as ‘wings’ (Numbers 15:38; Deuteronomy 22:12), does the notice that people were healed when they touched the fringe of Jesus’ garments (Matthew 9:20, 14:36; Mark 6:56; Luke 8:44) derive from a christological reading of Malachi 4:2, which says that the sun of righteousness will arise with healing ‘in his wings’ ... ? ..."

Allison, Dale "The Old Testament in the New Testament" in Paget, James Carleton (ed.) The New Cambridge History of the Bible (pp. 479-502) Cambridge University Press, 2013

 User Comments

Do you have questions or comments about these texts? Please submit them here.