Have mercy on me, God, according to your loving kindness. According to the multitude of your tender mercies, blot out my transgressions. Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity. Cleanse me from my sin. For I know my transgressions. My sin is constantly before me. Against you, and you only, have I sinned, and done that which is evil in your sight; that you may be proved right when you speak, and justified when you judge. Behold, I was born in iniquity. In sin […]
⛓ Read Psalm 51 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 tax collector's 'God, be merciful to me, a sinner' closely tracks the penitent's plea in Psalm 51, 'Have mercy on me, O God... blot out my transgressions,' the paradigmatic prayer of the contrite sinner. The shared vocabulary of mercy plus self-identification as sinner and the broken-and-contrite heart God accepts make this a strong verbal-thematic echo. High volume and coherence.
High confidenceEcho1
A fainter, low-volume reuse, carried by recurrence or thematic coherence.
The paradigm of godly sorrow yielding repentance unto salvation evokes David's penitential psalm, where 'a broken and contrite heart' is the sacrifice God accepts and the path to restored salvation (51:12, 17). Coherence with Paul's salvific, non-regretted sorrow is strong; volume is moderate since Paul alludes to the penitential pattern rather than quoting. The contrite-heart-unto-restoration logic is the shared structure.
Medium confidence