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Echoes and quotations

The Bible keeps quoting itself. Sometimes openly, when an apostle writes “as it is written” and sets down a line of the prophets; sometimes by a single rare word, reached for again centuries after it was first used. Biblion maps both, for the whole Bible.

Echoes

Some words are almost never used. When one of them turns up in only a handful of verses, those verses are bound together by it — a writer reaching for the same rare word another used, often on purpose, sometimes across a thousand years. Echoes are those links.

  • 16,444 echoes, joining 8,764 verses by 3,477 rare words.
  • 5,380 within the Old Testament and 5,267 within the New.
  • 5,797 from the New Testament back into the Old, through the Septuagint.

How they were found

Every word of the Hebrew Old Testament and the Greek New Testament is counted by its dictionary form. A word that stands in only two to five verses of its Testament links each pair of those verses, provided they are in different chapters; names of people and places are left out, because a shared name says nothing about a shared thought.

The New Testament was written in Greek and the Old in Hebrew, so a word cannot be matched across the two directly. The bridge is the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament the apostles read: where a rare word of the New Testament is also rare in the Septuagint, the Hebrew word it translates there leads to the Old Testament verse. A bridge like that can change the sense on the way, so each of these links was kept only where the word means the same at both ends: either a translation renders the two with one and the same word, or a reader compared the two verses and found the same sense.

Every echo names its word in the original language at both ends, so a reader can see exactly what the two verses share.

Reading them

At the foot of a chapter, under the text, the list of what the chapter connects to ends with its echoes: how many rare words it has and how many verses they reach. That opens the chapter’s page, every verse with an echo and each of its rare words. In the Study Bible a single verse can be followed too: select it, and where it has echoes the row of actions under it offers an Echoes button, which opens the verse’s own page, each rare word and every verse it reaches.

Quotations

The New Testament quotes the Old hundreds of times, in Greek, and often in the words of the Septuagint, the translation its readers knew. Where the Septuagint and the Hebrew say the same thing that makes no difference. Where they part, the apostles sometimes follow one and sometimes the other, and the difference can carry the point being made — the virgin of Isaiah 7:14, the body prepared of Psalm 40:6.

  • 404 quotations in 375 verses of the New Testament.
  • 300 where the Hebrew and the Septuagint agree, 78 that follow the Septuagint where they differ, and 26 that follow the Hebrew.

Reading them

In the Study Bible a quoting verse ends with a small mark: OT where the Hebrew and the Septuagint agree, LXX where the quotation follows the Septuagint, MT where it follows the Hebrew text. Pressing it opens the passage being quoted, says how the two forms differ where they do, and offers to set the Old Testament verse in Hebrew and in the Septuagint one above the other. The passages a chapter quotes are also named at its foot, under Quoted from.

Using the datasets

The echoes and the quotations are Biblion’s own work and are not published under an open license: all rights are reserved. Both are available for licensing — for a Bible app, a study tool, a publication or research. The echoes come as a database in which every link carries its word, both verses, the word’s position in the Hebrew or Greek of each, and how the link was established; the quotations, with the quoting verse, the quoted words as positions in the Greek, the passages quoted and the agreement of each.

To ask about a license, write to us and say what you would like to use them for.