Steeped in the Bible (from Sam)

The thing that most struck me about Jerome's letter was its effortless interweaving of biblical texts, more as a kind of mental vocabulary than a system of citation. The closest classical analogues I can think of, Plato and Plutarch, while possessed of a similar command of poetry, usually use it for explicitly argumentative purposes. While Jerome does plenty of this, the texts are more striking as an organic outgrowth of his thought process. There's a great passage in one of Garry Wills' books on Augustine about similar verbal echoes in the Confessions, which makes me wonder to what extent this is a common intellectual heritage of Patristic/early Christian authors--one already sees something similar happening in Paul, who often thinks in Psalm quotes even when it doesn't have any bearing on his point. Another point Wills makes about Augustine is that the text he would have had at his mental fingertips was the Vetus Latina rather than Jerome's Vulgate, which he remained mildly ambivalent about precisely because he was so steeped in the earlier translation. Which prompts the question of whether Jerome's citations in his letters are of the earlier Latin translation or his own.