All of the army of the sky will be dissolved. The sky will be rolled up like a scroll, and all its armies will fade away, as a leaf fades from off a vine or a fig tree.
⛓ Read Isaiah 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.
Quotation1
A formal citation — high verbal volume, often introduced by a saying-formula.
'The stars will be falling from heaven and the powers of the heavens will be shaken' draws on Isaiah 34:4, 'all the host of heaven shall rot away, the skies roll up like a scroll, all their host fall.' Mark's falling stars and shaken heavenly powers reproduce Isaiah's cosmic-judgment imagery (LXX 'the powers of the heavens shall melt').
High confidenceAllusion5
A deliberate verbal borrowing without a citation formula.
'The heavens will pass away… the host of heaven shall rot away, and the skies roll up like a scroll' is the prophetic dissolution of the heavens behind 'the heavens will pass away with a great noise, and the elements will be dissolved.'
High confidenceThe host of heaven rots away, the heavens roll up like a scroll, and all their host falls. Jesus' 'powers of the heavens will be shaken' echoes this dissolution of the celestial host on the day of judgment. Strong recurrence within the Day-of-the-Lord tradition.
High confidence'the stars will fall from the sky, and the powers of the heavens will be shaken' renders Isaiah 34:4, 'all the host of heaven shall rot away... all their host shall fall, as leaves fall from the vine,' the dissolution of the heavenly host in judgment.
High confidence'The sky shall be rolled up like a scroll, and all their host shall fall as a leaf falls from the vine, as figs fall from the fig tree' supplies both the rolled-up scroll of heaven AND the falling stars/figs imagery—the single densest source in this pericope. The LXX 'the heaven shall be rolled up as a scroll' matches John's wording closely.
High confidence‘You will roll them up like a mantle’ (v. 12) echoes the apocalyptic ‘sky rolled up like a scroll’ of Isa 34:4 (cf. Rev 6:14). The rolling-up image reinforces the dissolution of the heavens against the Son's permanence; an allusion clustering with the Ps 102 quotation.
Medium confidenceEcho2
A fainter, low-volume reuse, carried by recurrence or thematic coherence.
The heavens roll up like a scroll and the host falls like a leaf from the fig tree (LXX). The fig-tree image and the passing heavens cluster in Isaiah's judgment, faintly underlying Jesus' fig-tree parable juxtaposed with heaven and earth passing. Faint compositional echo.
Low confidence'All the host of heaven shall rot away and the skies roll up like a scroll' reinforces 'heaven and earth will pass away,' connecting this declaration to the cosmic-dissolution imagery already cited at 13:25. Recurrence of Isaiah 34 across the discourse supports its faint presence here.
Low confidence