I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean: from all your filthiness, and from all your idols, will I cleanse you.
⛓ Read Ezekiel 36 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.
‘Hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience… body washed with pure water’ (v. 22) fuses sprinkling and washing exactly as Ezekiel's new-covenant promise of cleansing does. High verbal volume on ‘sprinkle… clean water’; the coherence with the chapter's interior-cleansing argument (cf. 9:13–14) lifts it from echo to allusion.
High confidence'You were washed' (v.11) resonates with Ezekiel's new-covenant promise, 'I will sprinkle clean water on you and you shall be clean,' joined there to sanctification and the gift of the Spirit, exactly the triad Paul deploys (washed, sanctified, justified, in the Spirit). Coherence is strong; the cleansing-plus-Spirit pairing supports the allusion.
Medium confidenceEzekiel's promise 'I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleannesses' is the closest OT antecedent for cleansing from 'all defilement,' especially since 36:26-27 supplies the new-covenant Spirit Paul invokes throughout 2 Cor 3-7. The pairing of cleansing with the Spirit ('defilement of flesh and spirit') coheres tightly with Ezekiel's water-and-Spirit sequence. Volume is moderate; the link rests on shared cleansing-plus-Spirit logic rather than verbal quotation.
Medium confidenceEcho2
A fainter, low-volume reuse, carried by recurrence or thematic coherence.
'I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleannesses' supplies the cultic-cleansing background for baptismal washing-away of sins. Contested as direct echo versus shared motif.
Low confidenceThe promise to sprinkle clean water and cleanse from all uncleanness reinforces the 'purify a people' language of v.14 within the same Ezekielian new-covenant cleansing complex. Faint, secondary to 37:23.
Low confidence◇ Figural1
A typological pattern re-read in a later text — no verbal quotation, high figural coherence.
'I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean' is the eschatological cleansing promise most verbally aligned with 'you are clean.' Its new-covenant context coheres with the new commandment of 13:34. Volume of the clean-water motif raises confidence.
Medium confidence