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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

Jeremiah 4:23 → Genesis 1:2-3

Allusion

Later text

Jeremiah 4:23BSB

I looked at the earth, and it was formless and void; I looked to the heavens, and they had no light.

Earlier text

Genesis 1:2-3BSB

Now the earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the surface of the waters. And God said, "Let there be light," and there was light.

Significance

Jeremiah 4:23 deliberately inverts the opening movement of creation by describing the earth as תֹּהוּ וָבֹהוּ (tohu vavohu, "formless and void") — the rare collocation carried by Genesis 1:2 and shared by only these two verses in the Hebrew Bible — with "no light" where Genesis 1:3 had God creating light. This anti-creation vision systematically reverses Genesis 1's ordering: where God brought light from darkness (Gen 1:3), Jeremiah sees the lights extinguished; where God established mountains and fruitful land, Jeremiah sees them quaking and the fruitful land become wilderness. The prophet envisions divine judgment as cosmic de-creation, a return to primordial chaos. The shared vocabulary signals that Judah's sin has provoked a reversal of creation itself — God is undoing the work of Genesis 1, returning the land to its pre-creation state.

Found via: Treasury of Scripture Knowledge
Reference Type: Allusion
Connection Method(s): Longitudinal Theme

Linked Mentions 2

Trajectory Tables 2