lectionaries, commentaries, and the church’s homiletical traditions. It is even noted soberly in the margin of the Nestle-Aland text. Here is my point: figural reading neither presupposes nor asserts that the author of the earlier text predicted or consciously anticipated its figural fulfillment in the later. In fact, the retrospective recognition of a pattern of correspondence usually comes as a surprise. The four Gospels of our NT are full of examples of unexpected, retrospectively recognized,