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

Numbers 5:1-4 → Numbers 2:3

Echo

Later text

Numbers 5:1-4BSB

Then the LORD said to Moses, "Command the Israelites to send away from the camp anyone with a skin disease, anyone who has a bodily discharge, and anyone who is defiled by a dead body. You must send away male and female alike; send them outside the camp so they will not defile their camp, where I dwell among them." So the Israelites did this, sending such people outside the camp. They did just as the LORD had instructed Moses.

Earlier text

Numbers 2:3BSB

On the east side, toward the sunrise, the divisions of Judah are to camp under their standard: The leader of the descendants of Judah is Nahshon son of Amminadab,

Significance

Numbers 2:3ff assigns each tribe its specific position in the camp formation, beginning with Judah on the east side. Numbers 5:1-4 mandates the expulsion of the ritually unclean from this ordered camp because God's presence dwells within it. The purity legislation logically follows the camp organization: having established the sacred spatial arrangement (ch. 2), the text immediately addresses what threatens it -- the presence of טָמֵא (tame', "impurity") within a space sanctified by God's dwelling. The theological foundation is explicit: "so they will not defile their camp, where I dwell among them" (Num 5:3).

Found via: John Gill, Exposition of the Entire Bible (1763)
Reference Type: Echo
Connection Method(s): Longitudinal Theme — the camp order of Numbers 2 and the purity expulsion of Numbers 5 serve one reality, God dwelling at the center of His people ("so they will not defile their camp, where I dwell among them," Num 5:3) — the holy-dwelling theme that runs from Eden through tabernacle and temple to Immanuel and to the city into which nothing unclean will ever enter (Revelation 21:27).