Deuteronomy 4:16

Hebrew Bible

15 Be very careful, then, because you saw no form at the time the Lord spoke to you at Horeb from the middle of the fire. 16 I say this so you will not corrupt yourselves by making an image in the form of any kind of figure. This includes the likeness of a human male or female, 17 any kind of land animal, any bird that flies in the sky, 18 anything that crawls on the ground, or any fish in the deep waters under the earth. 19 When you look up to the sky and see the sun, moon, and stars—the whole heavenly creation—you must not be seduced to worship and serve them, for the Lord your God has assigned them to all the people of the world. 20 You, however, the Lord has selected and brought from Egypt, that iron-smelting furnace, to be his special people as you are today. 21 But the Lord became angry with me because of you and vowed that I would never cross the Jordan nor enter the good land that he is about to give you.

1 Corinthians 15:39

New Testament

38 But God gives it a body just as he planned, and to each of the seeds a body of its own. 39 All flesh is not the same: People have one flesh, animals have another, birds and fish another. 40 And there are heavenly bodies and earthly bodies. The glory of the heavenly body is one sort and the earthly another. 41 There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon and another glory of the stars, for star differs from star in glory. 42 It is the same with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable. 43 It is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power; 44 it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body.

 Notes and References

"... The list of earthly and heavenly creatures here in 1 Corinthians 15:39-42 follows the same order as enumerated in the aniconic discourse of Deuteronomy 4:15-19. If this is the text to which Paul alludes, he may be drawing on an exegetical tradition in the Second Temple period that reads Deuteronomy 4:15-19 as part of a wider Deuteronomic scriptural matrix employed to describe the nature of the cosmos, constructed and administered by God, having appointed the celestial bodies as divine or angelic delegates in his cosmic polis ..."

Burnett, David A. A Neglected Deuteronomic Scriptural Matrix for the Nature of the Resurrection Body in 1 Corinthians 15:39–42 (pp. 187-212) Fortress Academic, 2019

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