The new covenant: Jeremiah's Book of Consolation

Jeremiah son of Hilkiah was a priest from Anathoth, a village just north of Jerusalem. According to the opening of his book, the word of the LORD came to him in the thirteenth year of King Josiah, about 627 BC, and his ministry continued through the last kings of Judah to the fall of Jerusalem to Babylon in 586 BC and beyond. He was taken to Egypt after the murder of the governor Gedaliah (Jeremiah 43). The book is a collection, ordered by theme more than by date, and it survives in two forms: the Hebrew text and the shorter Greek version, which is about one-eighth shorter and arranges the oracles differently.

Chapters 30 to 33 are often called the Book of Consolation. They are almost entirely about hope, in contrast to the judgment oracles of the rest of the book. Chapter 32 is dated to the tenth year of Zedekiah (about 587 BC), when Babylon was besieging Jerusalem and Jeremiah, in prison, bought a field as a sign that fields would again be bought in the land. The date of chapter 31 itself is debated. Much of the first part (verses 2 to 22) speaks to the northern kingdom, 'Ephraim' and 'Samaria', which fell to Assyria in 722 BC, and some scholars place those oracles early in Jeremiah's career, in Josiah's day, when there was hope of reuniting north and south. Others hold that the whole was shaped around the fall of Jerusalem, and some think the new covenant passage was expanded later.

The audience, in either case, is a people facing or living in exile. The chapter promises that the LORD will gather the scattered families, and that the relationship broken by their sin will be renewed in a way the earlier covenant could not do.

Jeremiah 31 is mostly Hebrew poetry, a series of oracles with changes of speaker and mood, and a few lines of prose. The reader has to track where one oracle ends and the next begins, which the phrases 'declares the LORD' and 'the days are coming' often mark. The chapter moves between tenderness and warning, sorrow and hope. It was written to people who were not seeing what it describes. It is a promise.

The passage is also deeply tied to the rest of the Bible's story of covenants. The covenant 'I made with their fathers' (verse 32) is the one made at Sinai after the exodus. Its terms were given in the Torah, and it was repeatedly broken, as the prophets from Hosea onward say. The idea of a new covenant has to be read against that background, in which the problem is the people's heart and not the standard of the law. Deuteronomy already speaks of circumcision of the heart (30:6), and Ezekiel 36:26-27 describes a new heart and a new spirit, which together with Jeremiah forms the Old Testament picture of the future renewal.

Three cautions apply. The phrase 'new covenant' occurs in the Old Testament only here, so conclusions should be drawn from the passage itself and not from general ideas about covenants. The parties are 'the house of Israel and the house of Judah', which has to be allowed to stand before it is applied. And the New Testament quotes the passage at length, so the question of how it reads it is as much a part of the study as the first meaning.

Verses 1–6

The chapter begins with the whole people: the LORD will be God to all the families of Israel. Those who survived the sword found grace in the wilderness, a reference to the exodus pattern. Verse 3, in the words of the LORD, says that he has loved Israel with an everlasting love and so has drawn her with loving devotion (chesed). Israel is called 'virgin Israel', a people who will be rebuilt, dance with tambourines and plant vineyards on the hills of Samaria. Watchmen on Mount Ephraim will call people to go up to Zion, so the division of the north and south ends in common worship.

Verses 7–14

Joy over the return. The LORD will bring the remnant from the land of the north and the ends of the earth, including the blind and the lame, women with child and women in labour, a great company. They come weeping and he leads them by streams of water on a level path, because the LORD says he is a father to Israel and Ephraim is his firstborn. The firstborn language recalls the exodus (Exodus 4:22), and the northern tribe, not Judah, is called the firstborn. The LORD who scattered will gather and keep as a shepherd keeps a flock. They will be radiant over grain, new wine and oil; their life will be like a well-watered garden.

Verses 15–22

A voice is heard in Ramah, weeping and bitter lament: Rachel weeping for her children, refusing to be comforted because they are no more. Rachel, ancestress of Ephraim and Benjamin, is pictured as grieving as the exiles are led away; Ramah, in Benjamin, was a gathering point for captives (Jeremiah 40:1). The LORD answers: restrain your voice from weeping, for your children will come back from the land of the enemy. Ephraim is then heard confessing that he was disciplined like an untrained calf, asking to be turned so that he may return. The LORD replies in one of the most tender lines in the prophets, asking whether Ephraim is his dear son, and says his heart yearns for him and he will surely have mercy. Verse 22 closes the section with a puzzling line about a woman encompassing, or surrounding, a man. Interpreters offer several readings, and the meaning is best left open.

Verses 23–30

Blessing on Judah and the cities, and Jeremiah's remark that his sleep had been sweet, as if the promise brought rest to a hard-pressed prophet. The LORD will sow Israel and Judah with the seed of people and animals. As he watched to uproot and tear down, so he will watch to build and plant. The old proverb that the fathers ate sour grapes and the children's teeth are set on edge will no longer be used: each will die for his own iniquity. The proverb seems to have been a complaint that the exiles were suffering for their ancestors' sins, and the promise answers it with personal responsibility, as in Ezekiel 18.

Verses 31–34

'the days are coming, declares the LORD, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah.' It will not be like the covenant made when he took them by the hand to bring them out of Egypt, a covenant they broke. In the Hebrew, the LORD says that he was a husband to them; the Greek text, which Hebrews 8:9 follows, reads differently here, and the Hebrew word can also mean master. Four things mark the new covenant.

• First, the law is internal: the LORD will put it within them and write it on their hearts.
• Second, the relationship is restored in the covenant formula: 'I will be their God, and they will be My people.'
• Third, knowledge of the LORD will be universal: no one will need to teach a neighbour to know him, for all will know him, from the least to the greatest.
• Fourth, forgiveness is the ground: the LORD will forgive their iniquity and remember their sin no more.
• The last is the basis for the other three.

Verses 35–40

The LORD who gives the sun, moon and stars and stirs the sea declares that only if these ordinances fail will Israel's descendants cease to be a nation before him. Only if the heavens above can be measured will he reject all Israel for all they have done. Then the city will be rebuilt from the Tower of Hananel to the Corner Gate, and even the valley of corpses and ashes will be holy to the LORD. The city will never again be uprooted or demolished.

The new covenant passage is the high point of the Old Testament's account of what the LORD will do to solve the problem of human sin. The old covenant was not defective in its teaching, but it did not change the heart, and the people broke it. The remedy is not a better law but a changed people with the law inside them, and pardon that makes the relationship possible. Ezekiel puts the same hope in terms of the Spirit (Ezekiel 36:26-27), and together the two prophets lay the groundwork for the New Testament teaching that believers are given the Spirit.

The chapter also affirms God's faithfulness to Israel. His love is everlasting, and he ties Israel's future to the order of creation, so that the covenant people will not be abolished (verses 35 to 37). The New Testament does not retract this: Paul says in Romans 11:1 that God has not rejected his people. The chapter further sets personal responsibility alongside corporate hope (verses 29 and 30), in the manner of Ezekiel 18.

The pardon in verse 34 is the heart of the promise. Full forgiveness, with God choosing not to remember sin against them, is the Old Testament's boldest statement of grace, and the New Testament sees it as the basis for the sacrifice of Christ (Hebrews 10:15-18).

The New Testament says plainly that this promise is fulfilled in Jesus. At the Last Supper, Jesus takes the cup and says it is the new covenant in his blood (Luke 22:20; 1 Corinthians 11:25), and Mark 14:24 and Matthew 26:28 link the cup with the blood of the covenant and forgiveness. Paul calls himself and his coworkers ministers of a new covenant, not of the letter but of the Spirit (2 Corinthians 3:6). The letter to the Hebrews quotes Jeremiah 31:31-34 in full in chapter 8, in what is one of the longest quotations from the Old Testament in the New, and quotes the closing part again in 10:16-17. The author argues that Jesus is the mediator of this better covenant (Hebrews 8:6; 9:15; 12:24) and that, because forgiveness has been granted, there is no longer an offering for sin (Hebrews 10:18). This is promise and fulfillment in the plainest terms.

Matthew applies another verse of this chapter to the birth of Jesus. After Herod killed the boys of Bethlehem, Matthew says that what was spoken through Jeremiah was fulfilled: a voice was heard in Ramah, Rachel weeping for her children (Matthew 2:17-18, citing Jeremiah 31:15). The Rachel of Jeremiah wept as exiles left; Matthew sees another slaughter and exile in Jesus' infancy, and the Jeremiah chapter's next words, that the children will return and the days of weeping end, are the horizon of Jesus' story. This is better called an echo or a pattern of fulfillment than a prediction in the narrow sense, since Jeremiah is speaking of the exile. Matthew's point is that the exile's grief and its hope find their meeting point in Christ.