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

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

1 John 5:6 → Numbers 19:17

Echo

Later text

1 John 5:6BSB

This is the One who came by water and blood, Jesus Christ—not by water alone, but by water and blood. And it is the Spirit who testifies to this, because the Spirit is the truth.

Earlier text

Numbers 19:17BSB

For the purification of the unclean person, take some of the ashes of the burnt sin offering, put them in a jar, and pour fresh water over them.

Walk the Square · a single-voice walk of this pair around the Clowney square13:49

Significance

Numbers 19:17 prescribes the dual-element purification rite: ashes from the red heifer sacrifice mixed with "fresh water" (מַיִם חַיִּים, mayim ḥayyîm, "living water"). John declares that Christ "came by water and blood, Jesus Christ—not by water alone, but by water and blood" (1 John 5:6). The structural parallel is striking: just as purification required both a sacrificial element (ashes from burning) and living water, Christ's redemptive work involves both blood (His atoning death) and water. Samuel Mather, expounding the water of purification in Numbers 19 itself, reads it through the witness of 1 John 5:8: "it plainly signifies the sprinkling of the blood and spirit of Jesus Christ upon us, for Justification and Sanctification. 1 Joh. 5.8." That allocation is his typological gloss; other Reformed divines cut it differently. John's emphatic "not by water alone, but by water and blood" insists on the sacrificial component alongside the water. The physical outflow of blood and water from Christ's pierced side (John 19:34) dramatizes the same dual provision that Numbers 19 instituted in shadow form.

Found via: Samuel Mather, _The Figures or Types of the Old Testament_ (1683)
Reference Type: Echo
Connection Method(s): Analogy — a Reformed echo, not a type: the NT does not connect 1 John 5:6 to Numbers 19, and "water and blood" is widely read of Jesus' baptism and death. The correspondence is one of function, carried under the Longitudinal Theme of cleansing; the type in this rite is the heifer's ashes, which Hebrews 9:13 names.

Linked Mentions 5

Intertextuality Pairs 1

Theoretical Intertextuality Pairs

Trajectory Tables 4