The Hyperlinked Bible
Intertextuality Pair
Allusion
Later text
Who is a God like You, who pardons iniquity and passes over the transgression of the remnant of His inheritance—who does not retain His anger forever, because He delights in loving devotion? He will again have compassion on us; He will vanquish our iniquities. You will cast out all our sins into the depths of the sea.
Earlier text
Then the LORD passed in front of Moses and called out: "The LORD, the LORD God, is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in loving devotion and faithfulness, maintaining loving devotion to a thousand generations, forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin. Yet He will by no means leave the guilty unpunished; He will visit the iniquity of the fathers on their children and grandchildren to the third and fourth generations."
Micah 7:18-19 draws extensively on the divine self-revelation of Exodus 34:6-7, the foundational creedal statement of Yahweh's character. Exodus 34:6-7 declares God as "compassionate and gracious... forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin" (נֹשֵׂא עָוֹן וָפֶשַׁע וְחַטָּאָה, nose avon vafesha vechat'ah), and Micah echoes this with "Who is a God like You, who pardons iniquity (נֹשֵׂא עָוֹן, nose avon) and passes over the transgression (פֶּשַׁע, pesha) of the remnant of His inheritance?" The verbal overlap is unmistakable: Micah cites the Sinai revelation's core vocabulary of divine mercy. However, Micah adds that God "does not retain His anger forever, because He delights in loving devotion" (חֶסֶד, chesed), resolving the tension Exodus 34:7 introduced — "Yet He will by no means leave the guilty unpunished" — by emphasizing mercy's ultimate triumph. Christ is the ultimate expression of this mercy (Titus 3:5), through whom believers receive mercy upon mercy.