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

Isaiah 4:1 → Exodus 21:10

Allusion

Later text

Isaiah 4:1BSB

In that day seven women will take hold of one man and say, "We will eat our own bread and provide our own clothes. Just let us be called by your name. Take away our disgrace!"

Earlier text

Exodus 21:10BSB

If he takes another wife, he must not reduce the food, clothing, or marital rights of his first wife.

Significance

Exodus 21:10 specifies three obligations a husband owes his wife: food (שְׁאֵרָהּ, she'erah), clothing (כְּסוּתָהּ, kesutah), and marital rights (עֹנָתָהּ, onatah). Isaiah 4:1 dramatically inverts this by depicting seven women clinging to one man, offering to forgo all three provisions: "We will eat our own bread and provide our own clothes. Just let us be called by your name." The desperate reversal of Exodus 21:10's protections reveals the catastrophic scale of war casualties: so many men have fallen that women willingly surrender their legal rights simply to remove the social disgrace (חֶרְפָּה, cherpah) of being unmarried and childless in Israel.

Found via: John Gill, Exposition of the Entire Bible (1763)
Reference Type: Allusion
Connection Method(s): Contrast — the covenant standard inverted: Exodus 21:10 obligates a husband to maintain a wife's food, clothing, and marital rights, but in the day of judgment seven women renounce exactly those protections ("We will eat our own bread and provide our own clothes") just to bear one man's name — the law's guaranteed provisions overturned, so that the surrender of Exodus 21:10's rights becomes the measure of the devastation God's judgment has wrought.