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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

Graph View — tap the constellation icon in the top bar to see this page's connections as a web of light: gold points are passages, and the coloured threads are the connection types. Click any type in the graph's own legend to filter it in or out, and use the expand control for the full-screen night sky.

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Intertextuality Pair

Acts 7:39 → Numbers 14:1-3

Echo

Later text

Acts 7:39BSB

But our fathers refused to obey him. Instead, they rejected him and in their hearts turned back to Egypt.

Earlier text

Numbers 14:1-3BSB

Then the whole congregation lifted up their voices and cried out, and that night the people wept. All the Israelites grumbled against Moses and Aaron, and the whole congregation said to them, “If only we had died in the land of Egypt, or if only we had died in this wilderness! Why is the LORD bringing us into this land to fall by the sword? Our wives and children will become plunder. Would it not be better for us to go back to Egypt?”

+ 1 more earlier text

Earlier text

Numbers 14:3BSB

Why is the LORD bringing us into this land to fall by the sword? Our wives and children will become plunder. Would it not be better for us to go back to Egypt?”

Significance

"But our fathers refused to obey him. Instead, they rejected him and in their hearts turned back to Egypt" (Acts 7:39). Here Stephen's charge sharpens: having received the living words through Moses, the wilderness generation rejected the very deliverer God had vindicated, longing in their hearts for the slavery from which they had been rescued (Numbers 14:1-3). The pattern is now explicit — Israel resists the God-sent redeemer and prefers bondage to obedience. This settled disposition to refuse God's deliverers, tracing straight from the wilderness to the Sanhedrin, is the sin Stephen exposes: "you always resist the Holy Spirit, just as your fathers did" (7:51). Over against Israel's rebellion stands the true Deliverer, obedient where they failed, whose finished work secures for his people the rest their fathers forfeited through unbelief (Hebrews 3:16-19; 4:1-11).

Found via: Treasury of Scripture Knowledge
Reference Type: Echo
Connection Method(s): Contrast + Redemptive-Historical Progression

Linked Mentions 1

Trajectory Tables 1

Crossing Jordan Trajectory Table