Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Jeremiah · About this commentary
The New Covenant
Jeremiah 31:31-40
31 “Behold, the days come,” says Yahweh, “that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah, · WEB
The law is not repealed but relocated to the heart, the whole arrangement rests on sins being remembered no more, and the valley where children were burned ends up holy ground.
The announcement is made in the plainest possible terms — a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the day that I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt. What was wrong with the first one is stated at once, and it is not a fault in the terms: which covenant of mine they broke. The failure was on one side. The clause that follows is a wound rather than a legal note — although I was a husband to them.
What is new in the new one is a location, and the sentence has to be read exactly: I will put my law in their inward parts, and I will write it in their heart. The law is the same law. It is not abolished, not reduced, not exchanged for a principle. It is moved from tablets to the organ that decides. That answers the diagnosis this book has been building for thirty chapters: a heart that is incurable, sin engraved on it with an iron pen Jeremiah 17:1, a habit as fixed as skin. The only remedy for a defective will is a rewritten one. And the demand made in chapter 4 to circumcise the heart is here undertaken by the one who demanded it Jeremiah 4:4.
The second new thing is that the teaching profession becomes unnecessary. They will no longer each teach his neighbor... saying, 'Know Yahweh;' for they will all know me, from their least to their greatest. This book's priests did not ask where Yahweh was, and its prophets spoke out of their own hearts. The promise that everyone will know God directly is aimed at that failure. Nobody will depend on an intermediary who might be the problem.
The ground of all of it is the last clause, and the connecting word matters: for I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more. Forgiveness is not the reward at the end of the arrangement. It is the foundation under it. That is why the covenant can be promised to a people the book has just described as incapable of keeping one. It also answers a question the book opened and left hanging — whether a wife lawfully divorced could be taken back Jeremiah 3:1. A sin remembered no more is the only basis on which she could be.
The permanence is then staked on the most public things there are. If the sun by day and the ordinances of the moon and stars by night depart, then Israel can be cast off. If the heavens can be measured and the foundations of the earth searched out, then Israel can be cast off. Not before. And the chapter closes by walking the boundary of the rebuilt city, which is where the whole book finally lands. The line runs out to include the whole valley of the dead bodies and of the ashes. That is the ravine where children had been burned, renamed the valley of Slaughter Jeremiah 7:32, and it is now to be holy to Yahweh and never plucked up or thrown down again. The worst ground in the country is inside the walls at the end.
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