For on this day shall atonement be made for you, to cleanse you; from all your sins you shall be clean before Yahweh. (Leviticus 16:30)
⛓ Read Leviticus 16 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.
The sending of the Son 'as the atoning sacrifice (propitiation) for our sins' draws on the Day of Atonement ritual, where the blood of the sin offering and the scapegoat effect expiation before the LORD at the mercy seat (hilasterion). John casts Christ as the means of atonement fulfilling the Levitical kapporet.
High confidence◇ Figural6
A typological pattern re-read in a later text — no verbal quotation, high figural coherence.
‘He did this once for all, when he offered up himself’ (v. 27), set against high priests who ‘offer up sacrifices daily… first for his own sins,’ figurally invokes the Day of Atonement (Lev 16), the cult expounded in chs 9–10. No quotation; the once-versus-repeated, self-offering-versus-for-his-own-sins contrast is the borrowed pattern. The motif recurs from 1:3 onward (Hays' recurrence).
High confidenceThe two-roomed tabernacle and ‘the high priest alone, once in the year, not without blood’ (v. 7) describe the Day of Atonement (Lev 16). Hebrews reads the very architecture figurally — the veil barring the way in is ‘the Holy Spirit indicating’ that access to God was not yet open. The figure first heard at 1:3 now becomes the argument.
High confidenceThe Day-of-Atonement figure reaches its payoff: where the high priest ‘enters the holy place year by year,’ Christ enters heaven itself ‘once at the end of the ages.’ The whole typology turns on once versus yearly — the repeated rite was always pointing past itself to a single, final sacrifice.
High confidenceThe Day-of-Atonement figure makes its last turn. The bodies of the sin-offering ‘are burned outside the camp’ (Lev 16:27) — so Jesus ‘suffered outside the gate.’ The figure that began at 1:3 ends as a summons: ‘go out to him outside the camp, bearing his reproach.’
High confidence‘When he had by himself purified us of our sins’ (v. 3) quotes nothing, yet figurally invokes the Day of Atonement cult that chapters 9–10 will expound — the book's central typology. No verbal volume; high figural coherence (Hays, Reading Backwards).
Medium confidence‘To make atonement for the sins of the people’ (v. 17) reintroduces the Day of Atonement figure first sounded at 1:3 and expounded in chs 9–10. No quotation — the high-priestly, sacrificial pattern itself is the borrowing (figural). The recurrence is the point: the motif is being seeded before the argument arrives.
Medium confidence