The Hyperlinked Bible
Intertextuality Pair
Echo
Later text
Simon, Simon, Satan has asked to sift each of you like wheat. But I have prayed for you, Simon, that your faith will not fail. And when you have turned back, strengthen your brothers.” “Lord,” said Peter, “I am ready to go with You even to prison and to death.” But Jesus replied, “I tell you, Peter, the rooster will not crow today until you have denied three times that you know Me.”
Earlier text
Amos 9:9BSB
"For surely I will give the command, and I will shake the house of Israel among all the nations as grain is sifted in a sieve; but not a pebble will reach the ground.
Earlier text
Job 1:6-12BSB
One day the sons of God came to present themselves before the LORD, and Satan also came with them. “Where have you come from?” said the LORD to Satan. “From roaming through the earth,” he replied, “and walking back and forth in it.” Then the LORD said to Satan, "Have you considered My servant Job? For there is no one on earth like him, a man who is blameless and upright, who fears God and shuns evil." Satan answered the LORD, "Does Job fear God for nothing? Have You not placed a hedge on every side around him and his household and all that he owns? You have blessed the work of his hands, and his possessions have increased in the land. But stretch out Your hand and strike all that he has, and he will surely curse You to Your face." “Very well,” said the LORD to Satan. “Everything he has is in your hands, but you must not lay a hand on the man himself.” Then Satan went out from the presence of the LORD.
Jesus' warning to Peter — "Simon, Simon, Satan has asked to sift each of you like wheat" — is conceptually close to Amos 9:9, where God declares, "I will shake the house of Israel among all the nations as grain is sifted in a sieve; but not a pebble will reach the ground." Both picture the covenant people put through a violent agricultural sorting, and both attach a promise that the sorting will not lose what God means to keep. Amos guards the surviving remnant; Jesus guards Peter's faith by intercession.
The verbal warrant, however, is weaker than the conceptual one, and the file should not be read as claiming a quotation. Luke 22:31 uses σινιάζω (G4617, "to sift"), a rare verb that occurs nowhere in the Septuagint. Amos 9:9 LXX renders the shaking with λικμάω (G3039, "to winnow") and the sieve-image with the winnowing shovel. The two passages therefore share an image drawn from the same threshing floor but not a lexeme, and the resemblance rests on the picture rather than on Luke reaching for Amos's words.
The stronger and better-attested background of Luke 22:31 lies in the heavenly-court petition of Job 1:6-12, where the Accuser must ask before he may afflict and is answered with a bounded permission. The Greek of Luke 22:31 supports this: Satan "has asked" (ἐξῃτήσατο) — a verb of formal demand made to a superior authority, exactly the posture of the Accuser before Yahweh. That reading is carried at greater length by the companion pair on Luke 22:31 and Job 1:6-12, and Job 1 should be treated as the primary intertext here rather than Amos.
What Amos genuinely contributes is the note that makes this pastoral rather than merely ominous. Peter is about to deny his Lord three times before the rooster crows; the sifting is real and he will fail it visibly. Yet the shaking is God's own ("I will give the command"), and its explicit purpose in Amos is that nothing of value is lost. So it is with Peter: Jesus does not pray that the sieve be withheld but that the faith beneath it not fail, and he speaks of the turning back before the falling away has even happened — "when you have turned back, strengthen your brothers." The comfort is not that disciples are too strong to be sifted. It is that the One who intercedes for them is stronger than the one who asks to sift them, and that he loves them on the far side of their worst night. That is a Savior worth having, not merely a doctrine of perseverance worth holding.