The Old Testament Background of the Feeding of the 5,000 and Walking on Water in Mark

Intertextual approaches have long been the primary interpretive angel for understanding the significance of the closely-related feeding of the five thousand and walking on water pericopae in Mark. Interpreters hear echoes of the OT in the rich imagery and themes found in both passages. An interpretive key may be found in the narrator’s comment at Mark 6:34: “He had compassion on them, for they were like sheep without a shepherd.” Is there an OT context that makes sense of the feeding of the five thousand, the walking on water, and the shepherd/sheep motif together? The answer is “yes,” but that the context is not limited to one particular passage. A new model for intertextuality of the OT in the NT called “internarrativity” considers how NT texts evoke narratives found in multiple OT texts as opposed to individual texts. This study adopts an internarrative approach to Mark’s feeding of the five thousand and walking on water. It finds that Mark draws on exodus imagery found in many OT passages in narrating the feeding of the five thousand and walking on water. Mark portrays Jesus’s miracles as signs of the eschatological new exodus and return from exile. Psalms 77–81 in particular are a window into this exodus internarrative that attest to the constellation of the motifs of feasting in the wilderness, shepherd and sheep, and miraculous sea crossing—all in the context of the problem of exile and hope for a new exodus.