Psalm 40:6 → Exodus 21:6

In Exodus 21:6 a Hebrew bondservant who loves his master and refuses his freedom (v. 5) has his ear pierced with an awl (rāṣaʿ) at the doorpost as the permanent legal mark of glad, voluntary, lifelong service. In Psalm 40:6 David declares, against mere ritual, that God did not ultimately desire sacrifice "but my ears You have opened" (ʾoznayim kārîtā lî, "ears You have dug for me") — the opened ear being the organ of receptive obedience, unfolded in v. 8 as "I delight to do Your will, O my God; Your law is within my heart." The connection is honestly an Echo, not an Allusion or quotation: the verbs and physical images differ (Exodus bores through the ear, rāṣaʿ; the psalm digs open the ear, kārâ), and the psalm's nearest Hebrew-text sibling is in fact Isaiah 50:5 ("the Lord GOD has opened My ear, and I was not rebellious"), not Exodus 21. What the two texts genuinely share is the willing-servant idiom — the ear marked as the seat of a will gladly bound to a master, where service is chosen and loved rather than coerced (the Exodus servant "I do not want to go free"; the psalmist "I delight to do Your will"). This is best read as a Longitudinal Theme: one node in the canon-wide motif of the obedient-servant ear (Exodus 21 → Psalm 40 → Isaiah 50) — and not typology, since no NT text reads Exodus 21:6 onto Psalm 40 or onto Christ, and the pairing fails escalation and retrospective-interpretation tests; the Analogy is secondary (the love-bound bondservant resembling the will-delighting king). The motif consummates where the willing obedience the opened ear was always for is finally rendered without remainder: the Son who comes saying "a body You have prepared for Me... I delight to do Your will" (Heb 10:5-7, the psalm's LXX form) is the true willing Servant whose glad, lifelong, love-bound obedience — not the slave's compelled bond but the Son's freely-delighted one — is the very thing in which the soul finds its rest, so that to behold Him is to want His doorpost, His house, His will, as more desirable than any freedom apart from Him.