Handel and Brahms

I am singing in a performance of Brahms "German Requiem" this weekend. With several hours between rehearsal and performance, and steady pounding rain, I took refuge in a bookstore and found this:

"As a sacred, nonliturgical text for music, A German Requiem has but one peer, and that is the Jennens-Handel Messiah. Like Handel, Brahms knew his Bible well. ... "
from Michael Steinberg: Choral Masterworks: A Listener's Guide (OUP, 2005)

The text selection is so vital to these works- in some cases pairing snippets from far distant Biblical sections to present a unified concept in a musical movement.

Part Three opens with the soprano aria "I Know That My Redeemer Liveth." Having heard this a hundred times, I would have assumed that the entire text came from one place- in fact, though Jennens and Handel added Job to First Corinthians! Brahms paired a Beatitude with a Psalm in the first movement- other movements start with Pauline writings but close with a fugue from Revelation. These three- Brahms and Jennens and (perhaps) Handel- exhibit a bit of Biblical knowledge similar to Bach's gigantic, all-encompassing mastery of Biblical texts.