For thus says Yahweh to the men of Judah and to Jerusalem, “Break up your fallow ground, and don’t sow among thorns.
⛓ Read Jeremiah 4 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.
'Break up your fallow ground, and do not sow among thorns' — the contrast of receptive ground vs. thorn-choked soil maps directly onto Jesus' soils; thorns that choke recur in v.7, 22.
Medium confidenceEcho5
A fainter, low-volume reuse, carried by recurrence or thematic coherence.
Jeremiah's 'sow not among thorns' provides the agrarian image of seed choked by thorns (8:7), an established prophetic metaphor for a heart unready for the word. Low Volume but real Coherence with Luke's interpretation.
Low confidenceThe thorns that choke the word (8:14) reapply Jeremiah's agrarian warning against sowing among thorns. Low Volume, supporting echo.
Low confidenceJeremiah's 'Break up your fallow ground, and don't sow among thorns' supplies the precise agricultural antithesis of good soil versus thorn-choked ground seen in 4:7-8. The shared sowing-among-thorns image gives thematic coherence, though volume is faint and the wording is conventional farming language widely available in the prophets.
Low confidenceThe thorn-choked seed that 'becomes unfruitful' (4:18-19) recalls Jeremiah's warning not to sow among thorns, here moralized into the cares and riches that choke the word. The agricultural antithesis is coherent but the language is conventional, keeping it faint.
Low confidenceSowing among thorns reappears interpretively (v.22, thorns = cares and riches that choke the word), echoing Jeremiah's warning not to sow among thorns.
Low confidence