The Hyperlinked Bible
Intertextuality Pair
Echo
Later text
This is what the LORD of Hosts, the God of Israel, says: Add your burnt offerings to your other sacrifices and eat the meat yourselves! For when I brought your fathers out of the land of Egypt, I did not merely command them about burnt offerings and sacrifices, but this is what I commanded them: Obey Me, and I will be your God, and you will be My people. You must walk in all the ways I have commanded you, so that it may go well with you.
Earlier text
Psalm 40:6-8BSB
Sacrifice and offering You did not desire, but my ears You have opened. Burnt offerings and sin offerings You did not require. Then I said, “Here I am, I have come—it is written about me in the scroll: I delight to do Your will, O my God; Your law is within my heart.”
At Shiloh's failed temple Jeremiah delivers the most explicit prophetic relativizing of the cult in the OT: "Add your burnt offerings to your other sacrifices and eat the meat yourselves! For when I brought your fathers out of the land of Egypt, I did not merely command them about burnt offerings and sacrifices, but this is what I commanded them: Obey Me, and I will be your God" (Jer 7:21-23). The sacrificial system was never the substance of the Sinai covenant; covenant fellowship rests on a listening, obedient heart ("incline their ear," v. 24). Psalm 40:6-8 voices the identical conviction from the mouth of David: "Sacrifice and offering You did not desire, but my ears You have opened... I delight to do Your will, O my God; Your law is within my heart." This is not a citation — Jeremiah does not quote the psalm, nor the psalm Jeremiah — but two siblings in the same Spirit-led chorus (1 Sam 15:22; Isa 1:11; Hos 6:6; Amos 5:21-24; Mic 6:6-8) that names the Levitical cult's provisional character from within Scripture itself; hence Echo, and the link is a Longitudinal Theme (the obedience-over-sacrifice strand of the Sacrifice-and-Atonement motif), not typology (neither text is a historical pattern escalated in an antitype) and not promise-fulfillment (neither text makes a verbal promise the other fulfills). The shared note is striking: Jeremiah locates true covenant in the opened ear of obedience ("incline their ear"), and the psalm grounds willing obedience in the same image ("my ears You have opened"). The two texts converge on a longing the cult could awaken but never satisfy — a heart that delights to do God's will. That longing terminates in Christ, who takes the psalm's words on His lips at His incarnation (Heb 10:5-7) and renders the willing obedience the prophets demanded and the worshipers could not give, "taking away the first that He may establish the second" (Heb 10:9). The telos: what Jeremiah exposed as missing and David announced as coming, we now behold embodied — the Son who delights to do the Father's will is Himself the desirable end, so that beholding His willing obedience becomes our own delight in it, and we are transformed into worshipers who obey from the heart rather than from the altar.