“Whoever in the open field touches one who is slain with a sword, or a dead body, or a bone of a man, or a grave, shall be unclean seven days.
⛓ Read Numbers 19 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.
Allusion2
A deliberate verbal borrowing without a citation formula.
"Whoever touches a grave shall be unclean seven days" underlies "you are like hidden graves" whose walkers contract defilement unknowingly. The purity law about corpse-contact through graves is the precise basis of the woe in 11:44.
High confidenceTouching a grave or human bones renders one unclean seven days; the 'whitewashed tombs... full of dead men's bones' (v27) trades on corpse-impurity, the very thing graves were whitewashed to warn passersby against.
High confidenceEcho1
A fainter, low-volume reuse, carried by recurrence or thematic coherence.
The Torah's gravest corpse-uncleanness law marks anyone touching a grave or the dead as defiled seven days. The demoniac's permanent residence among the tombs (vv.2-3,5) renders him maximally unclean by this standard, which Mark heightens by adjoining the swine. Thematic coherence with the wider Markan concern for purity boundaries crossed by Jesus.
Medium confidence