The sun will be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood, before the great and terrible day of Yahweh comes.
⛓ Read Joel 2 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.
Allusion4
A deliberate verbal borrowing without a citation formula.
'The sun shall be turned to darkness and the moon to blood, before the great and terrible day of the LORD' is the direct source for the blackened sun and blood-moon of v. 12; high verbal volume and shared 'day of the LORD' framing (cf. v. 17).
High confidenceThe 'great and awesome day of the Lord' with cosmic signs feeds the apocalyptic timetable Paul is addressing. The Thessalonians' panic that the day had already come presupposes this prophetic frame.
Medium confidence'the sun shall be turned to darkness, and the moon to blood, before the great and awesome day of the LORD' is part of the Joel cluster behind the cosmic-portent language of the Son of Man's coming.
Medium confidence'The day of Jesus Christ' (also 1:10) christologizes the prophetic 'day of the LORD,' a fixed eschatological topos in Joel, Amos, and Zephaniah. Recurrence of the motif across the prophets and its centrality to Paul's eschatology give strong coherence; the transfer of YHWH's day to Christ is the load-bearing figural move.
Medium confidenceEcho1
A fainter, low-volume reuse, carried by recurrence or thematic coherence.
'The day of our Lord' as the eschatological revelation aligns with Joel's 'great and terrible day of the LORD,' the same chapter Paul has just drawn on in v.2. The internal recurrence (Joel within the immediate context) strengthens the case for a Joel-shaped horizon, though the phrase is generic enough to be merely traditional.
Medium confidence