The leaves of it were beautiful, and its fruit much, and in it was food for all: the animals of the field had shadow under it, and the birds of the sky lived in its branches, and all flesh was fed from it.
⛓ Read Daniel 4 forward — the whole chapter and its afterlife →Where this passage surfaces again, sorted by the strength of the link. Each kind of reuse — formal quotation, deliberate allusion, faint echo, figural pattern — carries its own mark. Follow any reference to read it in place.
Allusion3
A deliberate verbal borrowing without a citation formula.
'The birds of the sky lodged in its branches' closely echoes Daniel's great tree in which 'the birds of heaven dwelt,' a kingdom-as-tree image. High Volume in the nesting-birds clause and strong Coherence with the Kingdom-of-God comparison.
High confidenceNebuchadnezzar's tree whose branches shelter the beasts and in which 'the birds of the sky lived' supplies the proverbial great-tree-with-nesting-birds image behind 4:32. The recurrence of this kingdom-tree topos (Daniel 4:21 repeats it) gives strong availability and coherence with the contrast between the tiny seed and the sheltering kingdom.
High confidenceNebuchadnezzar's great tree under which the beasts find shade and 'the birds of the air dwelt in its branches' (cf. 4:21) — a world-empire tree image transposed to the Kingdom of Heaven.
High confidence