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

Psalms 107:40 → Job 12:24

Quotation

Later text

Psalms 107:40BSB

He pours out contempt on the nobles and makes them wander in a trackless wasteland.

Earlier text

Job 12:24BSB

He deprives the earth's leaders of reason and makes them wander in a trackless wasteland.

Significance

Psalm 107:40 describes God causing leaders to "wander in a trackless wasteland" (תֹּהוּ לֹא־דָרֶךְ, tohu lo-darekh), echoing Job 12:24 where God makes the leaders of the earth "wander in a trackless wasteland" (תֹּהוּ לֹא־דָרֶךְ, tohu lo-darekh). The identical phrase tohu lo-darekh ("waste without a way") appears in both texts, applying the primeval chaos term תֹּהוּ (tohu, cf. Genesis 1:2) to the fate of displaced rulers. Both Job and the psalmist use this cosmic imagery to assert that God reduces the confident plans of earthly leaders to formless confusion, reversing their sense of direction and control. Job 12:24 itself grounds this in the leaders' loss of לֵב (lev, "heart/understanding"), showing that the disorientation the psalm laments begins as an internal stripping of reason before it becomes an external wandering.

Found via: Treasury of Scripture Knowledge
Reference Type: Direct Quotation
Connection Method(s): Longitudinal Theme — the shared phrase "wander in a trackless wasteland" (תֹּהוּ לֹא־דָרֶךְ) binds Job 12:24 to Psalm 107:40 within the canonical reversal theme — God returning proud rulers to תֹּהוּ-confusion while He sets the humbled on a straight way (Ps 107:7, 41) — a theme consummated in the One who humbles the mighty and gives the lost a way home.