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Psalm 51:16-17

The New Testament’s use of Psalm

2 places · 2 kinds of echo · indexing Psalm 51:16-17, Psalm 51:16–17

The source

For you don’t delight in sacrifice, or else I would give it. You have no pleasure in burnt offering. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit. A broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.

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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.

Rom 12:1-2

The Psalm's claim that God does not delight in animal sacrifice but in 'a broken spirit' anticipates Paul's redefinition of true worship (logike latreia) as the offering of the whole self rather than the slain victim.

Medium confidence

Echo1

A fainter, low-volume reuse, carried by recurrence or thematic coherence.

Heb 10:1–10

A faint cousin-echo: David's penitential ‘you don't delight in sacrifice… you have no pleasure in burnt offering’ runs verbally parallel to Ps 40's and Hebrews' ‘you didn't desire… had no pleasure.’ Low volume and contested as a direct source, but the shared psalmic formula reinforces the thematic field of sacrifice displaced by the will of the heart.

Low confidence
Elsewhere in Psalm 51
Psalm 51 2Psalm 51:1 4Psalm 51:4 2Psalm 51:5 2Psalm 51:7 3Psalm 51:10 4