Like as a woman with child, who draws near the time of her delivery, is in pain and cries out in her pangs; so we have been before you, Yahweh.
⛓ Read Isaiah 26 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.
Allusion2
A deliberate verbal borrowing without a citation formula.
Isaiah pictures a pregnant woman writhing and crying out in her labor pains as an image of distress, a standard prophetic figure that informs Paul's labor-pain simile for sudden destruction (5:3).
Medium confidence'Like a woman with child... cries out in her pangs, so were we before you, O LORD' is part of the proto-apocalyptic Isaiah Apocalypse (chs. 24-27) that supplies Mark with resurrection-and-tribulation imagery. The labor-pang figure for the people's distress before deliverance coheres tightly with Mark's 'beginning of birth pains.'
Medium confidenceEcho1
A fainter, low-volume reuse, carried by recurrence or thematic coherence.
Daughter Zion as a woman writhing and crying out in birth pangs (LXX ōdinousa kai krazei) closely matches 'cried out in pain, laboring to give birth' (krazei ōdinousa). Thematic + verbal correspondence for the laboring-woman = people of God figure.
High confidence