Make the heart of this people fat. Make their ears heavy, and shut their eyes; lest they see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart, and turn again, and be healed.”
⛓ Read Isaiah 6 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.
'He has blinded their eyes and hardened their heart, lest they should see... and turn, and I would heal them' quotes Isa 6:10, the commission-text of judicial hardening (cf. its NT recurrence). High Volume and explicit attribution to Isaiah; the divine blinding explains the unbelief just described.
High confidenceAllusion2
A deliberate verbal borrowing without a citation formula.
The 'god of this world has blinded the minds' so they cannot see the light recasts Isaiah's hardening commission, where eyes are made blind 'lest they see.' High recurrence in Paul (Rom 11:8) and strong coherence with the veiling theme of ch. 3 support a deliberate allusion.
High confidence'Grieved at the hardening of their hearts' echoes Isaiah's prophecy of a people whose heart is made fat and unresponsive, a motif Mark deploys elsewhere for the obtuse. The vocabulary of hardened heart (porosis) recurs in Mark for opponents and disciples, raising recurrence and coherence.
Medium confidenceEcho1
A fainter, low-volume reuse, carried by recurrence or thematic coherence.
'Their minds were hardened' and a veil 'on their heart' resonate with Isaiah 6:10's hardening of heart so the people cannot perceive — a stock prophetic hardening motif Paul applies to Israel's reading of Moses. Faint and contested, since the immediate frame is the Exodus veil.
Low confidence