"Stringing Pearls" of Scriptiure Together

by Pastor Brent Emery

If you and I are going to really understand the Apostolic Scripture, we must always be thinking in terms of the Hebrew Scripture.

One of the Hebraic features we often see in the Apostolic Scripture is what I call “textual fusing,” or what the rabbis of the past called “stringing pearls.” The stringing of pearls occurs when a Gospel writer takes two or more verses from the Hebrew Scripture and “fuses” them, or “strings” them, to make a new verse.

When the writer does this, he expects his audience to know that this has happened without telling them overtly what he has done. This fusing of texts is designed to show various texts, which may initially seem unrelated, are in fact meant to be viewed as dealing with the same idea.

This “stringing pearls” takes phrases from different sections of Hebrew Scripture and fuses them to make a point that might otherwise have been missed without seeing these phrases united.

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