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An Intertextuality Pair — one connection between two passages, shown as linked verse cards: the Later text and the Earlier text it quotes, alludes to or echoes. The Significance essay explains why the link matters and where it points in Christ.

Reference Type— how explicit the link is: Quotation, Allusion, or Echo
Connection Method(s)— how it carries meaning: e.g. Typology, Promise-Fulfillment, Analogy, Longitudinal Theme
Found via— where the connection was identified, e.g. the Treasury of Scripture Knowledge or an Anchor-Text Network

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Intertextuality Pair

Luke 1:12-13 → 2 Kings 6:15

Echo

Later text

Luke 1:12-13BSB

When Zechariah saw him, he was startled and gripped with fear. But the angel said to him, “Do not be afraid, Zechariah, because your prayer has been heard. Your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you are to give him the name John.

Earlier text

2 Kings 6:15BSB

When the servant of the man of God got up and went out early in the morning, an army with horses and chariots had surrounded the city. So he asked Elisha, “Oh, my master, what are we to do?”

Significance

Zechariah is "startled and gripped with fear" at the altar of incense, and the angel answers with the standing biblical formula: "Do not be afraid, Zechariah, because your prayer has been heard" (Luke 1:13). Elisha's servant, waking to find Dothan ringed with horses and chariots, hears the same words - "Do not be afraid, for those who are with us are more than those who are with them" (2 Kings 6:16; note that the panic this file's title anchors at 6:15 is answered in the following verse). Both scenes turn on one structure: a man sees only the visible situation, and God's word reframes what is actually in the room - at Dothan, hills full of fiery chariots; in the temple, an angel already dispatched with an answered prayer. That correspondence is the whole of the connection, and it should be held modestly. "Do not be afraid" is the ordinary speech of theophany and angelophany throughout Scripture (Genesis 15:1; Judges 6:23; Daniel 10:12, 19), and Luke's nearest antecedent is not Elisha but Gabriel's own earlier appearance to Daniel: "Do not be afraid, Daniel... your words were heard" (Daniel 10:12) - the same two clauses, fear and answered prayer, in the same order, spoken by the same angel who is standing at the incense altar here. Nothing beyond the formula itself links Luke 1:12-13 to 2 Kings 6, and no public domain commentary is on record connecting them, so the pairing is recorded as an echo of a shared convention rather than as a source Luke is drawing on. What it does supply is the pattern's consistency. The God who opened a servant's eyes to see armies already surrounding Elisha is the God who has already heard, and already answered, an old priest's long-abandoned prayer. In both cases the fear is not rebuked as foolish but relieved by better information about who is present - and the news Gabriel brings is that the presence is about to arrive in person.

Found via: G.K. Beale & D.A. Carson (eds.), Commentary on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament (Baker, 2007) — attribution only; TOSK's Luke 1:12-13 entry does not carry 2 Kings 6:15, and John Gill's exposition of Luke 1:12-13 does not reference it (Gill cites Judges 6:22 and Matthew 28:5). Recorded as a shared theophany-convention echo, not a citation (see Significance).
Reference Type: Echo
Connection Method(s): Analogy