Intertextuality Pair

Acts 10:39 → Deuteronomy 21:22-23

Allusion

Later text

Acts 10:39BSB

We are witnesses of all that He did, both in the land of the Jews and in Jerusalem. And although they put Him to death by hanging Him on a tree,

Earlier text

Deuteronomy 21:22-23BSB

If a man has committed a sin worthy of death, and he is executed, and you hang his body on a tree, you must not leave the body on the tree overnight, but you must be sure to bury him that day, because anyone who is hung on a tree is under God’s curse. You must not defile the land that the LORD your God is giving you as an inheritance.

Significance

"They put Him to death by hanging Him on a tree" (Acts 10:39). Peter deliberately echoes the Deuteronomic law of the executed criminal: "anyone who is hung on a tree is under God's curse" (Deuteronomy 21:23). To die on a tree was to die accursed, exposed as one cut off from the covenant people and the land. Peter, and Paul after him, seize on precisely this: the manner of Jesus' death proclaims Him bearing the curse, for Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us, as Galatians 3:13 declares, citing this very statute. The correspondence is genuine and escalating: what the law pronounced on the guilty, the innocent One took up for the guilty, made a curse so that the accursed might be blessed. The tree of shame becomes the instrument of atonement, and the resurrection on the third day (Acts 10:40) is God's reversal of the curse — the accursed dead man raised, vindicated, and exalted as Savior.

Found via
Matthew Poole, Annotations upon the Holy Bible (1685)
Reference Type
Allusion
Connection Method(s)
Typology

▸ Cursed Is He Who Hangs

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