Later text
Luke 9:51BSB
As the day of His ascension approached, Jesus resolutely set out for Jerusalem.
Intertextuality Pair
Luke 9:51 → 2 Kings 2:10
Allusion
Earlier text
2 Kings 2:9BSB
After they had crossed over, Elijah said to Elisha, "Tell me, what can I do for you before I am taken away from you?" "Please, let me inherit a double portion of your spirit," Elisha replied.
+ 2 more earlier texts
Earlier text
2 Kings 2:10BSB
“You have requested a difficult thing,” said Elijah. “Nevertheless, if you see me as I am taken from you, it will be yours. But if not, then it will not be so.”
Earlier text
2 Kings 2:11BSB
As they were walking along and talking together, suddenly a chariot of fire with horses of fire appeared and separated the two of them, and Elijah went up into heaven in a whirlwind.
Significance
The hinge verse of Luke's Gospel carries a deliberate lexical signal. "As the day of His ascension approached, Jesus resolutely set out for Jerusalem" — and the noun Luke chooses for "ascension" is ἀνάλημψις, a word he uses nowhere else and which occurs nowhere else in the New Testament. It is the cognate noun of ἀναλαμβάνω, the verb the Septuagint uses three times in the space of three verses for Elijah's assumption: "before I am taken up from you" (2 Kings 2:9), "if you should behold me being taken up" (2 Kings 2:10), "and Elijah was taken up into heaven" (2 Kings 2:11). Luke then uses that same verb of Jesus three times in Acts (1:2, 11, 22). This is not an inference from an English translation; it is a rare Lukan word standing on the Greek of 2 Kings 2, and it opens the ten-chapter travel narrative that structures the middle of the Gospel.
- Found via
- Treasury of Scripture Knowledge
- Reference Type
- Allusion
- Connection Method(s)
- Typology (Providential Type, Backward-Looking) + Redemptive-Historical Progression
The dependence is confirmed by what follows immediately. Within three verses, James and John propose calling down fire from heaven on a Samaritan village in explicit imitation of Elijah (Luke 9:54, echoing 2 Kings 1:10-12), and within a further ten verses a would-be disciple asks to go first and say goodbye to his family, in the words of Elisha's own request when Elijah called him (Luke 9:61; 1 Kings 19:20). Luke has stacked the Elijah-Elisha material at exactly this seam because he is telling the reader how to read the journey that starts here.
The typology holds on all five characteristics and is graded Backward-Looking, since nothing in 2 Kings announces that Elijah's assumption points forward. The retrospective interpretation is supplied by Luke himself in this very word. Its correspondence is real — a bodily taking-up to heaven, witnessed by successors, followed by the conferral of the spirit that rested on the one who ascended — and its escalation is what the whole travel narrative exists to display.
That escalation is the substance of the verse. Elijah's ἀνάλημψις was something that happened to him at the end of a life of flight; he had run from Jezebel and asked to die under the broom tree, and the whirlwind came for him unbidden. Jesus' ἀνάλημψις is something he walks toward on purpose. Luke's phrase for the resolve is literally that he "set his face" — the prophetic idiom of Ezekiel and of the Servant who says "I have set my face like flint" (Isaiah 50:7). And the road to his taking-up runs through Jerusalem, which means it runs through the cross. Elijah was carried up out of trouble. Jesus set out for it.
That is the desirable thing here, and it should not be softened into an example of determination. The ascension Luke has in view is not an escape from the world but the far side of a deliberate descent into its worst. He turned toward Jerusalem knowing what was in it — and everything that follows for ten chapters, every parable and every healing and every hard word, is spoken by a man walking on purpose toward the place where he would be taken up by being lifted on a cross first.
Linked Mentions 2