In a debate between Jesus and the Sadducees about the rising of the dead, the Synoptics narrativize Christ rebuffing sect members for their non-resurrection-theology in Matthew 22:23-33, Mark 12:18-27, and Luke 20:27-40. Jesus asserts that God is the God not of the dead but of the living in these accounts. Indeed, from Jesus’ standpoint, God is the present-tense God of Israel’s forebearers (Matt 22:32; Mark 12:26; Luke 20:37).
Though Matthew, Mark, and Luke portray Jesus citing Exodus 3:6 and 15 as support for death’s reversal, these Exodus passages themselves rely on Genesis’ deeper, allusive vertical context. Particularly, Genesis features three parallel narratives in which YHWH appears to a patriarch and says he is the God of that individual’s dead progenitor. YHWH says this to Isaac and Jacob in 26:24 and 28:13, respectively, following Abraham’s death in 25:7-11. Again, God speaks similarly to Jacob in 46:3 after Isaac’s passing in 35:29. As Exodus 3:6 and 15 indicate the dead patriarchs’ ongoing existence, so Genesis 26:24 and 28:13, along with 46:3, suggest the same. As such, these passages support Jesus’ claim about Exodus 3.
Yet a survey of Genesis’ more expansive, book-wide horizontal context depicts the theological thought-world that makes death’s reversal even possible in these verses.
How? Where?
Genesis traces a storyline in which narrative after narrative illustrates elements that make death’s undoing conceivable. These elements include reversals (like renewed wombs and turnabouts of desperate plights), (re)creations (like new life after cataclysmic de-creation), and particularly important for this study, God’s committed relationality (like election), which serve as the primary colors that later authors exegetically develop into the white patina of eschatological resurrection (e.g., Dan 12:1-3; Rev 20-22).
And these primary colors themselves appear to rely on the prelapsarian vision that the relational creator-God created humanity to live an embodied existence with himself in an un-cursed land.
To back these claims, my method relies on identifying relevant allusions, repetitions, and analogies across both vertical and horizontal contexts. These correspondences may be marked by lexical, semantic, conceptual, thematic, and plot associations. My approach synthesizes and engages with broad OT/Hebrew Bible, Second Temple, and NT scholarship, including but not limited to textual-reuse methodologies and insights articulated by Beale, Berman, Carson, Docherty, Evans, Fishbane, Gesundheit (Bar-On), Goldman, Grossman, Harmon, Hays, Henze, Lincicum, Lyons, Postell, Rom-Shiloni, Sailhamer, Segal, Schaper, Schnittjer, Schultz, Shively, Sommer, Sternberg, Teeter, Tooman, Tzoref, and Zakovitch, et al.
In short, I will argue in this paper that Jesus’ appeal to Exodus 3 alludes to Genesis’ deeper, vertical context in chapters 26, 28, and 46. These narrower Genesis pericopes themselves are situated within a larger, book-wide horizontal context in which reversals, (re)creations, and God’s all-important relationality abound. These elements make death’s reversal possible, yet I will highlight only select examples. Moreover, this study suggests broader implications for OT/NT study (e.g., establishing preliminaries for the exodus, prophetic miracles, national restoration, et al.).
Ultimately, with Nicaea, we confess that Jesus “rose on the third day according to the scriptures,” and those writings appear to include Genesis.