and Yahweh said to Moses, “Tell Aaron your brother, not to come at all times into the Most Holy Place within the veil, before the mercy seat which is on the ark; lest he die: for I will appear in the cloud on the mercy seat.
⛓ 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.
‘Into the second the high priest alone, once in the year’ (v. 7) restates the controlling restriction of Lev 16:2 — entry behind the veil only on the one prescribed day. High thematic coherence and verbal volume (‘within the veil… mercy seat… ark’); the prohibition is precisely the ‘way not yet revealed’ Hebrews exploits (v. 8).
High confidenceEcho1
A fainter, low-volume reuse, carried by recurrence or thematic coherence.
The veil 'before the mercy seat' that only the high priest may pass on the Day of Atonement defines what the torn curtain guarded. Its rending at the moment of death coheres with an atonement reading — the way into the holiest opened — making Leviticus 16 a coherent secondary intertext to the Exodus veil.
Medium confidence◇ Figural2
A typological pattern re-read in a later text — no verbal quotation, high figural coherence.
‘Entering into that which is within the veil’ (v. 19) names the inner sanctum that Lev 16 reserves for the high priest on the Day of Atonement alone. Hebrews reads the veil figurally as the boundary Jesus crossed once for all ‘as a forerunner’ — the same Day-of-Atonement typology seeded at 1:3 and expounded in chs. 9–10 (Hays' recurrence and figural coherence).
High confidence‘Boldness to enter into the holy place… through the veil’ (vv. 19–20) inverts the Day-of-Atonement restriction: where Aaron must not come within the veil ‘at all times’ lest he die, believers now have boldness to enter always. Figural reversal of the Lev 16 prohibition — the veil that barred access (cf. 9:8) is now the opened ‘new and living way.’
Medium confidence