Principle 9

Allusion: the wording of one passage echos the wording of another, indicating a connection between them.

EXAMPLE (Ex. 3:3, 5 and Gen. 6:14ff.):

The image of baby Moses, floating precariously yet fetus-like on the Nile, is one of the enduring ones in the Bible. But modern English readers are seldom aware that the Hebrew word for Moses’s little vehicle—rendered by virtually all modern versions as “basket”—is a rare Egyptian loan word (teiva) meaning “box,” and is in fact the very same word used in the earlier Flood story to describe Noah’s famous vessel. The reader of the Hebrew is thus assured that Moses, like Noah before him, will be saved. I have tried to retain the connection between the two passages by rendering Moses’s basket as “little-ark”; the classic King James Version did likewise with “ark”—which derives from a Latin word meaning “box.”

 

 Principle 10 »