The children of Israel saw Moses’ face, that the skin of Moses’ face shone: and Moses put the veil on his face again, until he went in to speak with him.
⛓ Read Exodus 34 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.
Exodus 34:35 ('the children of Israel saw the face of Moses, that the skin of Moses' face shone') supplies the shining-face datum Paul reads as a fading glory. Recurrence across 34:29-35 and verbal overlap ('face of Moses... shone/glory') make this a strong allusion.
High confidenceExodus 34:35 ('Moses put the vail upon his face again, until he went in to speak with him') gives the repeated veiling Paul reinterprets as concealing the glory's end. Recurrence with 34:33 strengthens the allusion; Paul's 'reading of the old covenant' makes the Sinai veil a hermeneutical figure.
High confidence'With unveiled face' (3:18) inverts Exodus 34:35, where Israel saw Moses re-veil his shining face; now all believers behold with face unveiled. The veil/unveiled antithesis depends directly on the Exodus 34 veiling scene.
Medium confidence