“Comfort, comfort my people,” says your God.
⛓ Read Isaiah 40 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.
The titulature 'God of all comfort' who 'comforts us in all our affliction' draws directly on the programmatic 'Comfort, comfort my people' that opens Second Isaiah. The verbal density of comfort-language (parakaleo/paraklēsis) matches Isaiah's nacham/LXX parakaleite, and the consolation of an afflicted people awaiting redemption is the precise thematic field Paul occupies. High volume and recurrence across Isaiah make this the controlling text.
High confidenceSimeon is 'looking for the consolation (paraklesis) of Israel,' the exact Septuagintal keynote of Isaiah's 'Comfort, comfort my people.' Volume is high (the noun consolation), the Isaiah background recurs throughout the Nunc Dimittis, and coherence is exact: the end of exile-comfort arrives in the child.
High confidenceEcho3
A fainter, low-volume reuse, carried by recurrence or thematic coherence.
Paul urges the church to 'forgive him and comfort (parakaleō) him' lest he be overwhelmed. The comfort/paraklēsis vocabulary that saturates 2 Corinthians is rooted in Isaiah 40's 'Comfort, comfort my people,' the LXX charter text for eschatological consolation. Coherence with the letter's comfort theme is high; verbal echo is real but generic, hence medium.
Medium confidenceThe programmatic 'comfort, comfort my people, says your God' underlies the whole consolation vocabulary of 2 Cor 1-7 and resurfaces here in 'God comforted us.' Recurrence is strong because Paul's repeated paraklesis language draws on Deutero-Isaiah's comfort oracle. Volume here is moderate, since 49:13 is the nearer verbal parallel and 40:1 supplies the broader thematic frame.
Medium confidence'Comfort, comfort my people' establishes the prophetic theme of divine consolation that informs 'eternal comfort and good hope.'
Medium confidence