How to read this page

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

Acts 11:3 → Genesis 34:14

Echo

Later text

Acts 11:3BSB

and said, “You visited uncircumcised men and ate with them.”

Earlier text

Genesis 34:14BSB

"We cannot do such a thing," they said. "To give our sister to an uncircumcised man would be a disgrace to us.

Significance

The Jerusalem believers' objection — "You visited uncircumcised men and ate with them" (Acts 11:3) — voices the ancient boundary marked by the word "uncircumcised," which from the patriarchs on branded the outsider unfit for covenant fellowship: "To give our sister to an uncircumcised man would be a disgrace to us" (Genesis 34:14). Circumcision was the covenant sign, and to eat with the uncircumcised was to breach the separation it enforced. Peter's defense is that God Himself has erased the disgrace — what God has cleansed no one may call unclean (Acts 10:15) — for the true circumcision is now of the heart, by the Spirit (Romans 2:29), accomplished in Christ (Colossians 2:11). The connection is analogical: the old idiom of exclusion is invoked precisely to announce its abolition in the gospel that seats Jew and Gentile at one table.

Found via: G.K. Beale and D.A. Carson, Commentary on the New Testament Use of the Old Testament
Reference Type: Echo
Connection Method(s): Analogy