in that you have brought in foreigners, uncircumcised in heart and uncircumcised in flesh, to be in my sanctuary, to profane it, even my house, when you offer my bread, the fat and the blood, and they have broken my covenant, to add to all your abominations. You have not performed the duty of my holy things; but you have set performers of my duty in my sanctuary for yourselves. Thus says the Lord Yahweh, No foreigner, uncircumcised in heart and […]
⛓ Read Ezekiel 44 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.
Allusion1
A deliberate verbal borrowing without a citation formula.
The charge that Paul 'brought Greeks into the temple, and has defiled this holy place' directly engages Ezekiel's denunciation of admitting uncircumcised foreigners into the sanctuary, profaning God's house. Strong thematic coherence with the temple-defilement-by-Gentiles accusation; this is the conceptual basis of the soreg barrier the crowd believes was breached.
High confidenceEcho2
A fainter, low-volume reuse, carried by recurrence or thematic coherence.
Ezekiel's denunciation of the uncircumcised in heart and flesh entering the sanctuary supplies the paired heart/flesh circumcision categories Paul deploys ('uncircumcision of your flesh', v.13). The shared dual idiom supports the echo, though it is less verbally direct.
Medium confidence2:25-29 the pairing 'uncircumcised in heart and flesh' appears in Ezek 44:7-9 barring those 'uncircumcised in heart and uncircumcised in flesh' from the sanctuary — the dual (heart/flesh) circumcision distinction Paul exploits.
Low confidence