Jeremiah 31–33; 36–39; Lamentations 1; 3

25–30 minSession 1: Rachel Weeping and a Law on the Heart

"I have loved thee with an everlasting love" (31:1–14)

The chapter opens in the wilderness with survivors: "The people which were left of the sword found grace in the wilderness" (31:2). Then the line the lesson gives children this week: "Yea, I have loved thee with an everlasting love: therefore with lovingkindness have I drawn thee" (31:3). What follows is a return march, and it is not triumphant. The gathered include "the blind and the lame, the woman with child and her that travaileth with child together," and "they shall come with weeping, and with supplications will I lead them" (31:8–9). God calls himself "a father to Israel, and Ephraim is my firstborn" (31:9). The section ends with the lesson's title: "I will turn their mourning into joy, and will comfort them, and make them rejoice from their sorrow" (31:13).

The six-outlooks essay notes that the return under Cyrus fulfilled this only in part. Judah and Benjamin came back, but for the northern tribes, the "Ephraim" of this chapter, no comparable return happened in antiquity, and the chapter itself pushes the horizon out "from the coasts of the earth" (31:8). The chapter heading in the Latter-day Saint edition reads it as a last-days gathering. That heading is a modern editorial summary, not scripture, but it shows how the distant view reads the text: the return is not finished.

Ephraim bemoaning himself (31:18–20)

"I have surely heard Ephraim bemoaning himself thus; Thou hast chastised me, and I was chastised, as a bullock unaccustomed to the yoke: turn thou me, and I shall be turned" (31:18). God answers like a parent who cannot sleep: "Is Ephraim my dear son? is he a pleasant child? for since I spake against him, I do earnestly remember him still: therefore my bowels are troubled for him; I will surely have mercy upon him" (31:20). The practical disciple hears every parent of a struggling child in that verse. A parent can hold a line and still lie awake.

The rabbi explains where Jews hear it. Jeremiah 31 is the haftarah for the second day of Rosh Hashanah, and it ends on 31:20, a verse also recited among the Remembrance verses of the Rosh Hashanah additional service. On the day we say God judges the world, we hear God say that His insides churn for a wayward child.

The sour grapes retired (31:27–30)

"In those days they shall say no more, The fathers have eaten a sour grape, and the children's teeth are set on edge. But every one shall die for his own iniquity" (31:29–30). The honest questioner calls this a real moral advance, and Ezekiel 18 develops it at length. You will see in Session 4 that the narrative of this same book does not live up to it, and he will not let that go.

The practical disciple says the verse cuts both ways in a family. To the adult child it says: your parents' failures shaped you, but they do not get to be the permanent explanation for your choices. To the parent it says you are not the sole author of your child's choices, and you can put down the weight of believing every wandering is your verdict. The LDS scholar ties the proverb to the covenant that follows: the retired sour-grapes proverb (31:29–30) belongs to the same reorientation toward each person's own heart and accountability.

A new covenant (31:31–34)

"Behold, the days come, saith the LORD, that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, and with 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; which my covenant they brake, although I was an husband unto them" (31:31–32). Then: "I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts; and will be their God, and they shall be my people. And they shall teach no more every man his neighbour... for they shall all know me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them" (31:33–34).

Every essay notes that this is the only place in the Hebrew Bible that uses the phrase "new covenant." The academic scholar reads it in its own century. In its setting it answers a concrete problem: the Sinai covenant had visibly failed. The recipients are the houses of Israel and Judah, and the content is not a new law but the same Torah ("my law") held in a new way. The LDS scholar says it in five words: It does not abolish Torah; it relocates it.

A small textual fact matters here. Where the Hebrew of 31:32 says "although I was an husband unto them," the Greek reads "and I regarded them not," and Hebrews 8:9 follows the Greek. The academic explains that the Greek probably reflects a Hebrew word one letter different, and that Hebrews 8:9, quoting the whole passage, follows the Greek, and the early Christian reading of the passage as replacing the old covenant was built on the Septuagint. The LDS scholar draws the same conclusion: So the New Testament's most important use of this chapter rests on the Septuagint form of Jeremiah.

The doctrinal connector reads the passage through Restoration scripture. When early converts were told their earlier baptisms would not do, the Lord said: "this is a new and an everlasting covenant, even that which was from the beginning" (D&C 22:1). The covenant is new to the people receiving it and old in its origin. Elder Alan R. Walker's April 2026 talk "A Peculiar Treasure," which the lesson cites, starts from Sinai, where Exodus 19:5 sets "two simple but powerful conditions: to obey His voice and to keep our covenants with Him." Walker does not mention Jeremiah, but the connector sees the fit. Sinai's conditions do not change in Jeremiah; what changes is where they are kept, from stone tablets to "inward parts."

Elder David A. Bednar's "Abide in Me, and I in You; Therefore Walk with Me" (April 2023) asks, "Are the truths of the Savior's gospel written in the fleshy tables of our hearts?" The phrase is from 2 Corinthians 3:3, where Paul is already reading Jeremiah, and Bednar pairs it with Alma's question about a "mighty change in your hearts" (Alma 5:14). The "mighty change" (Mosiah 5:2) is the Nephite name for Jeremiah's heart-written law.

"They shall all know me" gets an institutional answer in D&C 84, which says the greater priesthood holds "the key of the knowledge of God" and that "in the ordinances thereof, the power of godliness is manifest" (84:19–20), and which borrows Jeremiah's own words, "until all shall know me... even from the least unto the greatest" (84:98). In Latter-day Saint teaching, the connector says, the temple is where that knowledge is received. The same section turns Jeremiah's warning on the Church, condemning the early Saints "until they repent and remember the new covenant, even the Book of Mormon... not only to say, but to do" (84:57). A covenant kept only on paper is exactly what Jeremiah says the fathers broke.

The practical disciple brings the heart-written law home. It is the difference between a family that keeps rules because someone is checking and a family whose members would keep them in an empty house. He quotes Elder Walker, who offers a practical sentence for anyone who feels far from that engraved heart: "The Lord does not ask for perfection all at once; rather, He asks for honest and broken hearts, humble spirits, and a willing readiness to keep our covenants—even when it requires sacrifice." And he leaves a self-check: Which commandment do I keep only when observed?

Wrestle: whose new covenant?

Hebrews 8 quotes all of 31:31–34 and concludes: "In that he saith, A new covenant, he hath made the first old. Now that which decayeth and waxeth old is ready to vanish away" (Hebrews 8:13). The honest questioner names what that line supported for much of Christian history: supersessionism, the belief that the Church replaced Israel and the covenant with the Jews had lapsed.

The Jewish answer from Jeremiah's own words. The rabbi makes three points. First, look at who the covenant is with. Not a new people. The same two houses that went into exile. Second, what is written on the heart is "my law," torati, my Torah. Radak, writing in Provence around 1200, reads it this way: the newness of the covenant, he writes, is that it will be kept and not broken like the covenant at Sinai. Third, read past the point where Hebrews stops quoting. In 31:35–37 the prophet swears by sun, moon, and sea that "the seed of Israel" will not "cease from being a nation before me for ever," and 33:24–26 repeats it. Read in its own context, the new covenant arrives with an answer to Hebrews 8:13 already attached.

The honest questioner's sources. He points out that Rabbi Dovid Rosenfeld makes these points for a popular audience, and notes that "they shall all know me" plainly has not happened yet, so the passage looks forward. He also reports a scholarly observation that cuts the other way: Alon Goshen-Gottstein observes that the passage had little life in classical Jewish interpretation outside medieval polemic against Christian readings. Christian institutions have moved as well; the Vatican's 2015 document "The Gifts and the Calling of God Are Irrevocable" affirms that God's covenant with Israel has never been revoked. The academic scholar's verdict is short. Read historically, the passage makes no argument about Christianity at all.

Where Latter-day Saints stand. Latter-day Saints sit at an unusual angle. Restoration theology stresses gathering the literal house of Israel, which gives Saints reason to share the Jewish objection, while their claim of a restored covenant brings back a softer version of what Jewish readers resist. The LDS scholar and the doctrinal connector both see the "new and everlasting covenant" as closer to Jeremiah than Hebrews is. D&C 84:57 reads Jeremiah's promise as renewal with a gathered Israel rather than replacement of Israel, closer to Jeremiah's own frame than Hebrews 8:13, and read through D&C 22 and 66, Jeremiah's "new" covenant is a renewal of what Israel had at the start and lost, not a replacement of Israel. The rabbi, speaking of the Latter-day Saint idea of something ancient restored rather than something obsolete replaced, agrees that that instinct is closer to Jeremiah. He adds a gift from the Hebrew: The Hebrew root for "new" also names the new moon, which is the old moon coming back.

The honest questioner's minimum is one any reader can keep. At minimum, notice that the passage is addressed, word for word, to someone else first.

Capstone: Rachel in Ramah, six ways (31:15–17)

"A voice was heard in Ramah, lamentation, and bitter weeping; Rahel weeping for her children refused to be comforted for her children, because they were not. Thus saith the LORD; Refrain thy voice from weeping, and thine eyes from tears: for thy work shall be rewarded, saith the LORD; and they shall come again from the land of the enemy. And there is hope in thine end, saith the LORD, that thy children shall come again to their own border" (31:15–17).

The six-outlooks essay borrows a framework from Donald W. Parry of BYU, whose chapter "Ways to Read Isaiah: Six Outlooks" lays out the near view, the distant view, dual or multiple fulfillment, likening, personal reading, and reading for doctrine. The essayist is careful about whose voice is whose. This essay applies his framework. It does not speak for him. The new covenant is the more famous text this week, but Jeremiah 31:15–17 is unusual because it rewards all six, and because two of them are already built into the canon: Matthew quotes verse 15, and verses 16–17 turn the lament into a promise. (A small note from the rabbi: in most Hebrew Bibles this chapter's verses are numbered one lower, so the rabbis cite this as 31:14.)

1. The near view. Ramah was a town of Benjamin just north of Jerusalem, and later in the book Nebuzar-adan releases Jeremiah "from Ramah, when he had taken him being bound in chains among all that were carried away captive" (40:1). Ramah was a collection point. A voice heard in Ramah is a voice heard along the deportation route. Rachel was the mother of Joseph, and through Ephraim and Manasseh the ancestress of the northern tribes Assyria had carried off, and the mother of Benjamin, in whose land Ramah and Jeremiah's Anathoth lay. Her children are the exiles of both catastrophes. She was buried by the road (Genesis 35:19; compare 1 Samuel 10:2), not in the family tomb, close enough to hear her descendants pass. The Hebrew carries her story. Her first recorded words were "Give me children, or else I die" (Genesis 30:1), and "refused to be comforted" echoes Jacob mourning her son Joseph (Genesis 37:35). An audience living through the deportations would have heard a family story become a national one.

2. The distant view. "They shall come again from the land of the enemy" reaches past the moment, and the return from Babylon only partly filled it. The near fulfillment proves the promise was not empty, and the unfinished part keeps it open.

3. Dual fulfillment. After Herod's massacre in Bethlehem, Matthew writes, "Then was fulfilled that which was spoken by Jeremy the prophet" (Matthew 2:17), and quotes 31:15. Matthew is not claiming that Jeremiah foresaw Herod while the Babylonians were at the gates. He sees a pattern recurring. The link runs through the grave on the road to Bethlehem. The essayist notices that elsewhere Matthew often writes "that it might be fulfilled" (1:22; 2:15; 2:23), but here and at 27:9, also attributed to Jeremiah, he writes only "then was fulfilled." Matthew does not say Herod's murders happened in order to fulfill scripture. The text supports at least that much restraint.

The rabbi adds what a Christian reader usually misses. Matthew 2:18 quotes the refusal to be comforted over the children of Bethlehem, and stops. Jeremiah does not stop. The next words are an order to stop crying, with a reason. In Jewish memory Rachel is not inconsolable grief. She is the mother whose weeping works.

4. Likening. Nephi's word is the Latter-day Saint name for this outlook: "I did liken all scriptures unto us" (1 Nephi 19:23). The essayist cites Krister Stendahl's argument that Matthew's formula quotations work much like the Qumran pesher commentaries, which read a prophet as speaking of the community's own time. Matthew 2:18 is likening done by an apostle.

The rabbis likened the verse boldly, and two essays tell the story. Rashi on Genesis 48:7 explains why Jacob buried Rachel by the roadside: so that when Nebuzaradan marched the exiles down that road, she could come out of her grave and weep, and be answered with 31:16. In Eikhah Rabbah, Proem 24, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Moses each plead for the exiles and are not answered. Then Rachel speaks. She had given Jacob secret signs so her father could not swap in Leah, then taught the signs to Leah so her sister would not be shamed. If she, flesh and blood, was not jealous of her rival, why should the eternal King be jealous of idols that are nothing? The patriarchs argue merit; Rachel argues that God should be at least as generous as she was, and she wins. Rachel's tomb outside Bethlehem is one of the most visited places of Jewish prayer, busiest on the eleventh of Cheshvan, the traditional anniversary of her death. This year that fell on October 22, four days before this lesson begins.

For a reader this week, likening means asking who is weeping in Ramah now: parents of children who have walked away, families scattered by migration or war. The text does not explain the grief. It names it, at full volume, as something God hears.

5. Personal reading. Parry's fifth outlook lets a phrase answer a need that has little to do with the passage's setting. "Thy work shall be rewarded" (31:16): Rachel's "work" is her mothering, and a reader worn out by caring for a struggling child or a dying parent may hear it as addressed to them. The essayist sets one rule: do not mistake a personal impression for the passage's plain meaning, and do not impose your impression on someone else as exegesis. The practical disciple says the order matters for anyone grieving a child through death, estrangement, or addiction. The weeping is heard first. The promise comes after.

6. Doctrine. God does not rebuke Rachel's refusal to be comforted. Her grief is "a voice... heard," and God's reply gives reasons: "for thy work shall be rewarded... and there is hope in thine end." He does not argue her out of her grief. He gives her a future that outweighs it. Set this beside Lamentations 1, which you will read in Session 5, where Zion "hath none to comfort her." Lamentations records the absence of comfort honestly, and Jeremiah 31 does not erase that record. It answers it. The poem also shows God moved, "my bowels are troubled for him" (31:20), and Latter-day Saint readers will think of the God who weeps in Moses 7:28–29.

Matthew's placement opens one more layer. Paul calls death "the last enemy" (1 Corinthians 15:26), and read in Christ's light the children of Bethlehem "come again from the land of the enemy" through resurrection; D&C 137:10 adds that children who die before accountability are saved in the celestial kingdom. That is not what Jeremiah meant at the fall of Jerusalem, and the essayist insists on the distinction. Keep the layers distinct and the reading stays honest.

Finally, placement. The poem moves from a mother's grief to a son's repentance, "turn thou me, and I shall be turned" (31:18), to a covenant written on the heart. The doctrine of the new covenant is introduced by a weeping mother and a repenting child, not by a legal formula. The deportees at Ramah, the mothers of Bethlehem, the pilgrims at Rachel's tomb, and a reader this week with a lost child of their own all hear the same order: a lament first, then God's answer, and only after both, the covenant.

Think deeply.

1. The returning exiles "come with weeping" (31:9), and the gathering includes the blind, the lame, and women in labor. What does it say about God's idea of a homecoming that the weak are named first and the tears are not edited out?
2. Rachel is not rebuked for refusing comfort; she is given a reason to stop. Think of someone whose grief you have tried to argue them out of. What would giving them "a future that outweighs it" look like, if you cannot promise outcomes?
3. "A parent can hold a line and still lie awake." Where are you holding a line with someone you love? What would it mean for them to know that God's "bowels are troubled" for them too, and so are yours?
4. Which commandment do you keep only when observed? What would it take for that one to move from the outside to the inside this year, and who could help you without becoming the one who checks?
5. Jeremiah's new covenant is addressed "to the house of Israel, and to the house of Judah," and Jews still read it as theirs. How does it change your own covenant language to remember that the passage was addressed to someone else first?
6. The rabbi says Rachel is "the mother whose weeping works." Is there a grief of yours that you have treated as a failure of faith? What would it mean to treat it instead as a voice God hears?

25–30 minSession 2: A Field at Anathoth and the Branch of Righteousness

Buying a field during a siege (32:1–15)

It is "the tenth year of Zedekiah," the Babylonian army is besieging Jerusalem, and Jeremiah is "shut up in the court of the prison" (32:1–2). His cousin Hanameel arrives with an offer: buy my field at Anathoth, "for the right of redemption is thine" (32:7–8). The practical disciple points out that Anathoth, Jeremiah's hometown a few miles away, was likely already in territory Babylon controlled. On the open market the field is worth nothing.

Jeremiah buys it, and the academic scholar shows how exact the legal detail is. The cousin invokes the kinsman's duty to keep land in the family (Leviticus 25:25). Silver is weighed, not counted; coinage had not reached Judah. The deed is made twice, one copy sealed against tampering and one left open (32:11), a double-document format known from later Aramaic and Judean legal papyri. And keeping deeds "in an earthen vessel, that they may continue many days" (32:14) is how the Dead Sea Scrolls survived. The sign-act works because it is an ordinary commercial transaction done at the least ordinary moment possible. The meaning is stated: "Houses and fields and vineyards shall be possessed again in this land" (32:15).

The rabbi notes that 32:6–27 is the haftarah for the Torah portion Behar, which contains the law of land redemption, and says what moves a Jewish reader is how legal the hope is. Jewish hope has often looked like this: not ecstasy but a deed, a contract, a wedding held during a war. The practical disciple says the same in his own idiom. Faith here is not a feeling. It is paperwork done carefully for a future the man doing it will probably not see. He gives examples: most disciples have a field at Anathoth: the mission fund kept going for a child not currently attending church, the anniversary dinner booked during a cold season in a marriage, the class you enroll in at fifty-three.

Two Latter-day Saint readings widen the frame. The LDS scholar sets Jeremiah beside Lehi, who was commanded to leave "the land of his inheritance" (1 Nephi 2:4) while Jeremiah was commanded to buy land as it was being lost. Both are prophetic signs pointing in opposite directions: Lehi's says the future lies elsewhere, Jeremiah's that fields will be bought again here. And Jeremiah's deed sealed in a jar and the plates Moroni sealed in the earth are, structurally, the same gesture. The doctrinal connector hears redemption in the transaction. The "right of redemption" is the duty of the goʼel, the kinsman-redeemer, and Jeremiah buys back land he will never farm, for heirs who will not come home for generations. The plan of salvation runs on the same logic: a Redeemer pays the price before the family can benefit.

"Is there any thing too hard for me?" (32:16–44)

After the purchase Jeremiah prays. He begins with "Ah Lord GOD!... there is nothing too hard for thee" (32:17), recites the Exodus, and ends in something close to bewilderment: "Behold the mounts, they are come unto the city to take it... And thou hast said unto me, O Lord GOD, Buy thee the field for money" (32:24–25). The practical disciple notes that Jeremiah's prayer afterward is honest: he obeyed, and then he asked why. God hands his own words back as a question: "Behold, I am the LORD, the God of all flesh: is there any thing too hard for me?" (32:27). The rabbi adds a liturgical fact that keeps the question open. That is where the haftarah stops.

The doctrinal connector hears an echo in the Book of Mormon from about a decade earlier, when Nephi told his brothers on the road back to Jerusalem that "the Lord is able to do all things according to his will... if it so be that they exercise faith in him" (1 Nephi 7:12). Two verses later he mentions Jeremiah's imprisonment (1 Nephi 7:14).

God's answer goes on past the haftarah. The city will fall, and then: "I will make an everlasting covenant with them, that I will not turn away from them, to do them good; but I will put my fear in their hearts, that they shall not depart from me" (32:40). "And fields shall be bought in this land, whereof ye say, It is desolate" (32:43). Jeremiah's purchase becomes the pattern for a whole country's recovery: "Men shall buy fields for money, and subscribe evidences, and seal them, and take witnesses" (32:44). The lesson pairs 32:37–42 with the new covenant of chapter 31, and asks what the Lord promises when you make covenants with him.

Call unto me, and the voice of the bridegroom (33:1–13)

Jeremiah is still in the prison court when the word comes again: "Call unto me, and I will answer thee, and shew thee great and mighty things, which thou knowest not" (33:3). The promise turns to healing, "I will bring it health and cure" (33:6), and then to sound. "Again there shall be heard in this place, which ye say shall be desolate... The voice of joy, and the voice of gladness, the voice of the bridegroom, and the voice of the bride" (33:10–11).

The rabbi calls this the verse in the block Jews hear most often. Jeremiah had used those same four voices as a curse, promising that God would silence them in Jerusalem (7:34; 16:9; 25:10). Here he reverses them, and the seventh of the Seven Blessings under every Jewish wedding canopy quotes this verse. The city that sat "as a widow" supplies the words for every Jewish wedding. That, he says, is what "I will turn their mourning into joy" means in Jewish practice: the fasts are not cancelled, the weddings happen anyway, and at each one we quote the prophet who said they would.

The Branch, and a promise to the priests (33:14–26)

"In those days, and at that time, will I cause the Branch of righteousness to grow up unto David; and he shall execute judgment and righteousness in the land" (33:15). The lesson reads the Branch as the promised Messiah, the one who makes it possible to "build, and to plant" in ruins. Then come two guarantees: "David shall never want a man to sit upon the throne of the house of Israel; Neither shall the priests the Levites want a man before me to offer burnt offerings... and to do sacrifice continually" (33:17–18), each as sure as God's "covenant of the day, and... of the night" (33:20).

The academic scholar compares this with the earlier Branch oracle in 23:5–6. There the Branch "shall reign as king"; here he only "shall execute judgment and righteousness," and the royal promise now runs alongside an equal promise to the priests. That fits a later period, when the monarchy was gone and the priesthood was the institution that survived. The honest questioner cites W. J. Wessels, who shows that 33:15–16 moves the name "The LORD our righteousness" from the king to the city, and also proposes that the reworking was partly a way to cope with a promise that had not yet been fulfilled. The LDS scholar describes the likely author as a later hand who, writing when no son of David sat on any throne, insisted that the covenant with David was as fixed as day and night.

The doctrinal connector follows the priestly promise into the Restoration. John the Baptist said the Aaronic Priesthood "shall never be taken again from the earth, until the sons of Levi do offer again an offering unto the Lord in righteousness" (D&C 13:1). D&C 84:31–34 makes faithful priesthood holders those "sons of Moses" and "sons of Aaron," and D&C 128:24 names the offering: "a book containing the records of our dead." Jeremiah pictures altar smoke; the Restoration reads the promise as temple work for Israel's families, living and dead.

Wrestle: which Jeremiah, and did the promise hold?

Two editions. Three essays lay out the same facts. The Greek Septuagint Jeremiah is roughly one-seventh shorter than the Hebrew Masoretic text behind the King James Version, and it arranges the material differently, putting the oracles against the nations in the middle of the book, so this week's chapter 31 is chapter 38 in the Greek. Scholars once blamed an abridging translator, but two Hebrew fragments from Qumran Cave 4, 4QJer-b and 4QJer-d, agree with the shorter Greek form. A short Hebrew Jeremiah really existed. Emanuel Tov argued that the short form is an earlier edition and the Masoretic text a later, expanded one. And 33:14–26, this section, is the largest passage with no counterpart in the Greek; Johanna Erzberger calls it the longest of them and argues that it was added, not dropped.

How a believer can hold it. The honest questioner lays out the options. One is that inspired expansion is exactly what 36:32 describes: Jeremiah, Baruch, or later disciples added "many like words," and the longer edition is no less scripture for being later. Conservative scholars add that the passage fits Jeremiah's language and themes. Latter-day Saints have the Eighth Article of Faith. The critical reading is simpler: some of what the King James Version presents as Jeremiah's words were composed by scribes generations later. Session 3 will show that the book says plainly it grew.

Did the promise hold? After Zedekiah, no descendant of David ever sat on the throne of an independent Judah again. Christians read 33:17 messianically, with the Branch fulfilled in Jesus; Jewish tradition reads it as still pending. Both readings move a statement about an unbroken line onto a future king, and whether that is fulfillment or reinterpretation is the reader's call.

Think deeply.

1. What field at Anathoth are you refusing to buy because the present looks like a siege? What concrete "deed," with a date and a witness, could you sign this week for a future you believe God has promised?
2. Jeremiah obeyed and then prayed his confusion out loud (32:24–25), and the haftarah stops on God's question rather than an explanation. Can you pray that way? What would your version of 32:25 say?
3. Lehi was told to leave his land; Jeremiah was told to buy land. Both were obeying the same God in the same crisis. When have two faithful people you know received opposite directions, and how did you make sense of it?
4. The voice of the bridegroom was first a curse, then a promise, and now is sung at every Jewish wedding. Where in your life has something you thought was gone for good come back changed? Did you notice when it did?
5. The promise that David would "never want a man to sit upon the throne" did not hold in the way it was worded, and readers moved it onto a future king. Does that kind of rereading strengthen or strain your trust in prophecy? Where do you draw the line between fulfillment and reinterpretation?

20–25 minSession 3: The Scroll in the Fire

A book watching itself being made (36:1–19)

"In the fourth year of Jehoiakim" (36:1), about 605 BC, the year of Babylon's victory at Carchemish, God tells Jeremiah to write down everything spoken "from the days of Josiah, even unto this day" (36:2). The lesson asks you to notice why: "It may be that the house of Judah will hear all the evil which I purpose to do unto them; that they may return every man from his evil way; that I may forgive their iniquity and their sin" (36:3). The scroll is written so that it will not come true.

Jeremiah is barred from the temple ("I am shut up," 36:5), so Baruch writes and reads. He reads the scroll on a fast day "in the chamber of Gemariah the son of Shaphan the scribe" (36:10), then again to the officials, who ask how it was written. Baruch answers with what the academic scholar calls almost bureaucratic precision: "He pronounced all these words unto me with his mouth, and I wrote them with ink in the book" (36:18). Jeremiah 36 may be the most self-aware chapter in the prophetic literature.

Three or four leaves (36:20–26)

The officials hide Baruch and Jeremiah and take the scroll to the king. It is winter, and Jehoiakim sits by a brazier. "When Jehudi had read three or four leaves, he cut it with the penknife, and cast it into the fire that was on the hearth, until all the roll was consumed" (36:23). The practical disciple notices the pace. The king does it slowly. That is contempt, not panic. The academic scholar and the doctrinal connector both point to the contrast the narrator draws. Jehoiakim's father Josiah had torn his clothes at a scroll's reading (2 Kings 22:11). Here, "they were not afraid, nor rent their garments" (36:24).

Three officials, Elnathan, Delaiah, and Gemariah, "made intercession to the king that he would not burn the roll: but he would not hear them" (36:25). They lost, and the practical disciple thinks their losing is worth remembering. Sometimes the faithful act in a meeting is the objection that gets overruled, and it is still worth making.

The rabbi brings two rabbinic readings of the scene. The Talmud (Moed Katan 26a) says the scroll the king burned was Lamentations: Jehudi read "How doth the city sit solitary," and the king said, "I am king," and on through four verses, four "leaves," until 1:5, where the king cut out the divine names and burned them. Rashi adds that the original scroll held the single acrostics, chapters 1, 2, and 4, and the "many like words" of 36:32 were chapter 3, with every letter tripled. So, in the tradition, Lamentations 1 is what a king burned, and Lamentations 3 is what the prophet wrote back, tripled at every letter. The rabbi knows most scholars doubt Jeremiah wrote Lamentations. But the midrash is not doing history. It is saying that the response to a burned word is more word. The scene also produced law. Because 36:24 complains that no one tore their garments, the Talmud rules that one who sees a Torah scroll burned must tear his clothing, and from 36:27 it derives that he tears twice, once for the parchment and once for the writing.

"Many like words" (36:27–32)

"Then took Jeremiah another roll, and gave it to Baruch the scribe... who wrote therein from the mouth of Jeremiah all the words of the book which Jehoiakim king of Judah had burned in the fire: and there were added besides unto them many like words" (36:32). The academic scholar calls this verse the historian's favorite. That sentence is in effect a theory of how a prophetic book was composed: a core, a scribe, and growth. Since Sigmund Mowinckel's 1914 study, scholars have separated Jeremiah's poetic oracles, prose stories about the prophet (including chapters 36–45), and prose sermons; William McKane later described a "rolling corpus" that grew through later hands. Chapter 36 fits every one of these models, because it says outright that the scroll grew.

The LDS scholar puts it in a sentence: By the book's own account, Jeremiah was a growing text from the start. He connects it to the brass plates, which held "many prophecies which have been spoken by the mouth of Jeremiah" (1 Nephi 5:13). That fits a written collection in Jehoiakim's fourth year, before Lehi left. It also means the Jeremiah Lehi carried was an early stage of a book that kept growing after him. The honest questioner agrees the plates could not have held chapters 37–39 or either finished edition, and is plain about the rest. What they did hold is unknown, and it is worth saying so plainly. The LDS scholar draws the faithful conclusion: a people who believe in an open canon should not be unsettled by 36:32. The Bible itself says its prophetic books were added to.

The doctrinal connector sets the burned scroll beside the 116 pages Martin Harris lost in 1828. The Lord's answer then went the other way: "you shall not translate again those words which have gone forth out of your hands" (D&C 10:30), and the loss was covered by a parallel record on the small plates, "more particular" about what mattered (D&C 10:38, 40). In both cases the record ends up fuller than before, and the small plates are the very account of Lehi's Jerusalem that connects to this week. D&C 10:43 fits Jehoiakim's knife as well as Martin Harris's carelessness: "I will not suffer that they shall destroy my work."

The practical disciple reads the chapter as a story about losing your work. If you have had a project killed, a business fail, or a calling released before the work was done, this is the pattern. You do not pretend the fire didn't happen. You start the second roll.

Did the sentence on Jehoiakim land? (36:29–31)

After the burning, the word comes against the king: "He shall have none to sit upon the throne of David: and his dead body shall be cast out in the day to the heat, and in the night to the frost" (36:30). The honest questioner notes that his son Coniah (Jehoiachin) did take the throne, as 37:1 mentions without comment, and that 2 Kings 24:6 says Jehoiakim "slept with his fathers," the usual formula for a natural death. The apologetic answer is that a three-month reign ended by surrender and exile does not count as truly sitting on the throne, and no descendant of Jehoiakim reigned after 586. Critics say that redefines "sit" after the fact. Either way, readers should know they are choosing how loose a sense to accept.

Names in clay

Jeremiah 36 is crowded with officials, and some of their names have turned up in the ground. When Babylon burned Jerusalem, the papyrus documents burned and the clay seal impressions (bullae) that sealed them were baked hard. In 1982 Yigal Shiloh's excavation in the City of David found a room of 51 bullae in the destruction layer. One reads "Gemaryahu son of Shaphan," very plausibly the Gemariah from whose chamber Baruch read and who pleaded with the king (36:10, 25). It came from a controlled excavation, so its context is secure. The Gemaryahu bulla needs no such caution.

"Such caution" refers to the famous bulla of "Berekhyahu son of Neriyahu the scribe," Baruch with the full form of his name, published with a bulla of "Yerahmeʼel son of the king" (compare "Jerahmeel the son of Hammelech," 36:26). Both came from the antiquities market with no findspot. In 2014 Yuval Goren and Eran Arie published laboratory analyses concluding that the two Berekhyahu bullae are modern forgeries; Peter van der Veen, Robert Deutsch, and Gabriel Barkay published a defense in 2016. The Baruch bulla belongs in the "disputed" column. The academic scholar gives the principle. An artifact with no findspot that confirms a biblical name exactly deserves more suspicion, not less. The honest questioner notes that "Baruch's seal has been found" is a disputed claim, with the same provenance problem as the Mulek seal, which you will meet in Session 4.

Think deeply.

1. God has the scroll written "that they may return every man from his evil way" (36:3), so that its warnings will not come true. When has a hard word been given to you so that it would not have to happen? Did you hear it in time?
2. Jehoiakim cuts the scroll three or four leaves at a time, "slowly," as contempt. What are the quiet, unhurried ways you set aside words you do not want to hear, whether scripture, counsel, or a spouse's concern?
3. Elnathan, Delaiah, and Gemariah objected and lost, and their objection is still recorded. Is there an objection you did not make because you knew you would lose? Would you make it now?
4. The book says it grew: "there were added besides unto them many like words." Does knowing that scripture was dictated, burned, rewritten, and expanded make it feel more fragile to you, or more alive? Why?
5. What work of yours went into the fire this year? What would starting "the second roll" look like, and what might the second version hold that the first did not?

25–30 minSession 4: The King Who Asked in Secret

The last campaign

The historical frame is unusually well documented. The academic scholar cites the Babylonian Chronicle (ABC 5), which records that Nebuchadnezzar took "the city of Judah" in March 597 BC, seized its king Jehoiachin (the "Coniah" of 37:1), and appointed a king of his own choosing, Zedekiah. Zedekiah's revolt brought the siege that began in his ninth year (39:1) and ended about eighteen months later (39:2). The Lachish letters, written on potsherds during this campaign, include an officer watching for the fire signals of Lachish "because we cannot see Azekah," the two cities Jeremiah 34:7 names as the last holding out. Letter 6 complains that the words of the princes "weaken the hands" of the people, which the academic calls the very idiom the princes use against Jeremiah in 38:4, here turned against them. Hugh Nibley read these letters in 1981 as documents from Lehi's day, and the LDS scholar weighs that fairly. His parallels are suggestive rather than probative, but they set Lehi in a real military crisis.

More names from these chapters have turned up in clay. Eilat Mazar's excavations produced bullae of "Jehucal son of Shelemiah" and "Gedaliah son of Pashhur." Both names appear in Jeremiah 38:1 among the officials who demand Jeremiah's death, and Jehucal is the king's messenger in 37:3.

Zedekiah: believing and afraid (37:1–38:28)

The lesson asks you to weigh the evidence that Zedekiah believed Jeremiah against the evidence that he did not. The practical disciple says it is uncomfortable because Zedekiah is not a villain. He asks for prayer (37:3). He takes Jeremiah out of the dungeon and asks him "secretly in his house... Is there any word from the LORD?" (37:17). He moves him to the prison court and orders him "daily a piece of bread out of the bakers' street, until all the bread in the city were spent" (37:21). He swears "secretly" to protect him (38:16).

He also hands Jeremiah to the men who want him dead: "Behold, he is in your hand: for the king is not he that can do any thing against you" (38:5). And when Jeremiah tells him exactly how to save his life and the city (38:17), Zedekiah gives the real reason he will not: "I am afraid of the Jews that are fallen to the Chaldeans, lest they deliver me into their hand, and they mock me" (38:19). The king of Judah is afraid of being laughed at. Zedekiah's problem was never information; he lacked the willingness to be seen acting on the words he already had. Jeremiah's reply is short: "They shall not deliver thee. Obey, I beseech thee, the voice of the LORD" (38:20).

The lesson asks you to compare Zedekiah with Lehi's family in 1 Nephi 1–2, and the doctrinal connector makes the comparison sharp. Both received the same message; Lehi was mocked for it (1 Nephi 1:19) and left anyway, giving up "his gold, and his silver, and his precious things" (1 Nephi 2:4). One king trusted the prophet privately and disobeyed him publicly.

The honest questioner asks you to give the princes their due. Jeremiah was telling a besieged city that "he that goeth forth to the Chaldeans shall live" (38:2), which means desert. The princes have a case in 38:4. In any siege that is sedition, and they are not wrong about the effect, only, the narrator insists, about the source. They believed they were defending their homes.

The honesty question nobody asks (38:24–27)

Sunday lessons usually skip the end of chapter 38. Zedekiah gives Jeremiah a cover story: if the princes ask, say only that you begged not to be sent back "to Jonathan's house, to die there" (38:26). They ask, and Jeremiah "told them according to all these words that the king had commanded" (38:27). The honest questioner lays out the readings. Some defend it as a partial truth, since Jeremiah really had made that request (37:20), told to men who wanted him dead. Others see an honest portrait of a frightened man. The text makes no judgment.

The practical disciple takes two things from it. It is no license for shading the truth on a timesheet or to a spouse. But honesty and discretion are not the same thing, and no one owes everything to everyone who demands it. The test is whether my partial answer is protecting someone's life or protecting my own image. Zedekiah, who wrote the cover story, was protecting his image.

Ebed-melech and the rags (38:6–13; 39:15–18)

"Then took they Jeremiah, and cast him into the dungeon of Malchiah the son of Hammelech... And in the dungeon there was no water, but mire: so Jeremiah sunk in the mire" (38:6). A starving prophet sits in the mud of a cistern. Then Ebed-melech, an Ethiopian (Cushite) eunuch in the king's house, goes to the king "sitting in the gate of Benjamin," a public place, and says aloud, "these men have done evil in all that they have done to Jeremiah the prophet" (38:7–9). Those men are the most powerful princes in the city.

The practical disciple stops on the detail that makes him a model for ministering. Before the thirty men pull, Ebed-melech goes "under the treasury" for "old cast clouts and old rotten rags" and tells Jeremiah to put them "under thine armholes under the cords" (38:11–12). A starving man pulled from mud by ropes under his arms would have been badly torn. The rescue is bold, but it is also gentle and it is planned. The bold part of ministering is showing up and organizing the thirty; the rag part is the frozen meal labeled with reheating instructions because the widower has never used the oven. When you help someone, do you think about where the ropes will cut?

God's later message to him says, "thou shalt not be given into the hand of the men of whom thou art afraid" (39:17). He was afraid. So was Zedekiah. One of them acted anyway, and the reason God gives is "because thou hast put thy trust in me" (39:18).

The LDS scholar notes that the one person here who treats Jeremiah with ordinary tenderness is a foreigner. The doctrinal connector adds that a eunuch was, by Deuteronomy 23:1, an outsider to the assembly, and that Nephi's "all are alike unto God... black and white, bond and free" (2 Nephi 26:33) has a living example here. The rabbi admits his own tradition was uneasy with this. The Talmud (Moed Katan 16b) reads "the Cushite" as a nickname for Zedekiah, and Rashi records a reading that makes Ebed-melech into Baruch. Those readings honor Zedekiah and Baruch but erase the point. The plain sense is that the righteous man in Jerusalem's last days was an outsider. A rabbi should say so.

The city is broken up (39:1–14)

"In the ninth year of Zedekiah king of Judah, in the tenth month, came Nebuchadrezzar... and they besieged it. And in the eleventh year of Zedekiah, in the fourth month, the ninth day of the month, the city was broken up" (39:1–2). For the rabbi these are dates on a calendar: the first is the Tenth of Tevet, still a fast day, and the second, the breach of the walls, is remembered in the fast of Tammuz.

Babylon's officers sit in the middle gate (39:3), and one of them has been found. The KJV splits the names into "Samgar-nebo, Sarsechim, Rab-saris," but read with a different word division the Hebrew gives "Nebo-sarsekim the Rab-saris." In 2007 Michael Jursa identified a British Museum tablet recording a gift of gold by Nabu-sharrussu-ukin, the chief official, dated to Nebuchadnezzar's tenth year. The LDS scholar notes the match: Name and title match, and the name is rare. The academic scholar points out that the tablet is a routine temple receipt that sat unread in the museum for more than a century, and that ordinariness is what makes it valuable.

Zedekiah flees by night and is caught in the plains of Jericho. At Riblah, "the king of Babylon slew the sons of Zedekiah in Riblah before his eyes: also the king of Babylon slew all the nobles of Judah. Moreover he put out Zedekiah's eyes" (39:6–7). The practical disciple says it in one line. The last thing he saw was what his fear cost.

One textual note belongs here. Verses 39:4–13 are another passage missing from the Greek Jeremiah. The Greek does keep the Riblah account in chapter 52. The account closely parallels 2 Kings 25 and Jeremiah 52, which suggests the story was later filled out from Kings.

Then Nebuzar-adan takes the poor "which had nothing" and gives them "vineyards and fields at the same time" (39:10), and Jeremiah is taken out of the prison court and committed to Gedaliah, grandson of Shaphan, "so he dwelt among the people" (39:14). After all the talk of fields in chapter 32, the first fields handed out after the fall go to the people who had none.

Wrestle: Mulek and "the sons of Zedekiah"

This is the controversy Latter-day Saints are most likely to meet online. The Book of Mormon says a son of Zedekiah named Mulek escaped and reached the Americas: "Will ye say that the sons of Zedekiah were not slain, all except it were Mulek?" (Helaman 8:21; Mosiah 25:2; Omni 1:15). Jeremiah 39:6, 52:10, and 2 Kings 25:7 say the sons were killed at Riblah. Four essays take it up, and they agree more than they differ.

What 39:6 actually says. The word "all" appears with the nobles and not with the sons. The LDS scholar weighs that carefully. That proves nothing (the plain sense is a dynastic extermination), but the text does not explicitly close the door. He adds that "the king's daughters" were later alive at Mizpah (41:10; 43:6), so the royal household was not entirely wiped out. The academic scholar notes that 39:6 does not say every son was present.

The son of the king in 38:6. The cistern Jeremiah sank into belonged to "Malchiah the son of Hammelech." As the honest questioner notes, "Hammelech" is not a personal name. The Hebrew means "Malkiyahu, son of the king." Robert F. Smith and Benjamin Urrutia proposed that "Mulek" is a shortened form of a name like Malkiyahu, on the pattern of Baruch from Berekhyahu. Jeffrey R. Chadwick went further, discussing a stamp seal inscribed "belonging to Malkiyahu, son of the king," arguing that the title means a biological son, and calculating that Zedekiah, 21 at his accession and 32 when the city fell, could have had a son of 15 or 16.

The objections. The objections deserve equal space. A missing "all" is thin evidence. Mulek and Malkiyahu are related forms, not the same name. The title also appears for Jerahmeel under Jehoiakim (36:26), and "son of the king" may have worked partly as a court title for members of the royal house, so the verse does not say which king's son Malchiah was. The seal is unprovenanced: it surfaced in a dealer's catalog in 1991 and is now in a private collection. Its first editor questioned its authenticity, though later corpora accepted it. And the LDS scholar notes that a teenage son of Zedekiah would have been young to own the cistern of 38:6.

What can responsibly be said. The limits need to be stated as plainly as the possibility. The Hebrew Bible has a royal Malkiyahu in Zedekiah's court, the name could plausibly yield "Mulek," and no biblical text explicitly rules out a surviving son. That is a real intersection, not a demonstration, and Chadwick himself framed it as a possibility. The honest questioner's summary is that 38:6 shows a royal son named Malkiyahu was alive in Zedekiah's Jerusalem. It does not show that he escaped, and nothing outside the Book of Mormon says that he did. The academic scholar adds that mainstream scholarship has not engaged the Mulek question, and the biblical text neither confirms nor excludes it. The doctrinal connector, the most devotional voice on the panel, agrees on the basic fact: the Bible mentions no survivor, and that should not be glossed over.

Wrestle: the sour grapes at Riblah

The honest questioner sets Riblah beside 31:29–30. One chapter after retiring the sour-grapes proverb, Jeremiah prays to a God who "recompensest the iniquity of the fathers into the bosom of their children" (32:18), and the story ends with exactly that recompense. The sons did nothing; the father refused to surrender. One answer places 31:29–30 in the future, "in those days," as a promise that collective consequence will someday end. Another says Babylon did this, not God. But Lamentations 1:5 says outright that "the LORD hath afflicted her." The tension is not only between ancient and modern ethics. It runs through Jeremiah itself, and readers should be allowed to notice it.

Think deeply.

1. Zedekiah kept asking Jeremiah for a word from the Lord, and kept getting the same one. Where are you asking for more revelation about something you have already been told? What is actually stopping you?
2. "I am afraid... lest they mock me" (38:19). Whose mockery are you actually afraid of: in-laws, coworkers, a ward, your own children, an online crowd? What has that fear already cost?
3. Ebed-melech thought about the rags. Think of someone you are helping now. Where will the ropes cut them, and what small, unthanked thing could you do about it?
4. The rabbi admits his tradition tried to turn the righteous foreigner into Zedekiah or Baruch. Whose goodness in your life or ward have you been slow to credit because they were an outsider? What would it take to "say so"?
5. On Mulek, the panel agrees on the facts and leaves the conclusion open. How do you hold a faith claim that the evidence neither confirms nor rules out? Is "a real intersection, not a demonstration" enough for you?
6. Jeremiah 31 retires the sour-grapes proverb, and Jeremiah 39 shows children dying for a father's choice. Where in your family have you seen consequences fall on people who did not make the choices? What does the promise of 31:29–30 ask you to do about it now?

25–30 minSession 5: How Doth the City Sit Solitary

Eikhah: a book called "How"

The Hebrew book is named Eikhah, "How," from its first word: "How doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people! how is she become as a widow!" (1:1). The rabbis protected hope by reading closely. In the Talmud (Taanit 20a), Rav Yehuda notes the word "as." She is not a widow; she is like a woman whose husband has gone overseas and means to come back.

Who wrote it? The Hebrew book is anonymous. The attribution to Jeremiah comes from the Septuagint's preface, in which Jeremiah sits weeping, and from the Talmud: "Jeremiah wrote his own book, and the book of Kings, and Lamentations" (Bava Batra 15a). Most modern scholars doubt it. The LDS scholar summarizes Liz Boase's reasons: the acrostics follow different alphabetical orders, suggesting different poets; the theology is not Jeremiah's; and Lamentations 4:20 mourns Zedekiah as "the breath of our nostrils, the anointed of the LORD," which is hard to hear from the man who told him to surrender. The honest questioner adds that the Church edition's chapter headings ("Jeremiah laments...") are modern summaries, not part of the text, and that the triple acrostic of chapter 3 looks more like crafted communal liturgy than one prophet's private grief.

Still, the LDS scholar finds a small clue that cuts both ways. The speaker of 3:53–55 cries "out of the low dungeon," using the same word, bor, as Jeremiah's cistern in 38:6; but the poem says "waters flowed over mine head," and 38:6 says pointedly "there was no water." Ancient readers who heard Jeremiah's pit here were responding to something real in the language; the details do not match.

The alphabet of grief. Chapters 1–4 are acrostics. Each of the 22 verses of chapter 1 opens with the next letter of the Hebrew alphabet, and chapter 3 is a triple acrostic, three lines per letter, 66 verses. The academic scholar reports the common suggestion that the form imposes order on a catastrophe that has none, grief told from aleph to tav. The form also holds a historical clue: chapters 2–4 put pe before ʻayin, the order of Iron Age Israelite alphabets, and the Qumran scroll 4QLam does so in chapter 1 too, which suggests the Masoretic chapter 1 was later brought into line with the standard alphabet.

Older relatives. Sumerian laments written after the fall of Ur around 2000 BC describe the gods deciding a city's ruin, deserted streets, and a goddess weeping over her ruined house. F. W. Dobbs-Allsopp argues for a shared city-lament genre in the Bible and Mesopotamia. He sees the Israelite form as a native development, not a borrowing. Lamentations 1 shares the motifs: the city as a widow, empty festivals (1:4), the enemy in the sanctuary (1:10), destruction as the deity's own doing (1:12). The distinctive change is that the weeping woman is the city itself, Daughter Zion, who is also the guilty party: "Jerusalem hath grievously sinned" (1:8).

None to comfort her (Lamentations 1)

Read chapter 1 listening for one refrain. Jerusalem "hath none to comfort her" (1:2); "she had no comforter" (1:9); "the comforter that should relieve my soul is far from me" (1:16); "there is none to comfort her" (1:17); "there is none to comfort me" (1:21). The rabbi cites Alan Mintz's Hurban, which argued that in Lamentations the awareness of sin is secondary to the experience of abandonment. The confession is there, "The LORD is righteous; for I have rebelled" (1:18), but the dominant note is a woman no one comforts.

The honest questioner names the theological problem plainly. In Lamentations, God is not absent; God is the attacker. "The LORD hath afflicted her for the multitude of her transgressions" (1:5), says the poem, while describing a starving city whose children are "desolate" (1:16). Many modern readers, and especially survivors of catastrophe, find that theology of blaming the victim intolerable.

Then the city turns to the road. "Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by? behold, and see if there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow" (1:12). The practical disciple reads it as an assignment. That verse is a ministering assignment. The charge is not that no one fixed it, but that people passed by. He cites Kathleen M. O'Connor's argument that what sufferers need first is witnesses who will see and hear their pain rather than people who rush to explain it. Ward life has a predictable failure: the casserole on day three, then nothing by week six, when the widow is actually alone. Put a reminder on your calendar for the third month.

I am the man (3:1–20)

"I am the man that hath seen affliction by the rod of his wrath. He hath led me, and brought me into darkness, but not into light" (3:1–2). God is a bear lying in wait, a lion, an archer: "He hath bent his bow, and set me as a mark for the arrow" (3:12). Worst of all: "when I cry and shout, he shutteth out my prayer" (3:8). The doctrinal connector notes that Joseph Smith made no changes to Lamentations in his Bible translation, and the Restoration does not soften it.

Instead the Restoration supplies a companion lament. In March 1839, after months in Liberty Jail, Joseph Smith prayed, "O God, where art thou? And where is the pavilion that covereth thy hiding place?" (D&C 121:1). It is Lamentations 3:44's image of God hidden behind a covering, prayed from a cell, and the speaker of Lamentations 3:55 likewise cries "out of the low dungeon." D&C 121 answers the lament rather than condemning it: "My son, peace be unto thy soul; thine adversity and thine afflictions shall be but a small moment" (121:7).

New every morning (3:21–33)

Then the turn the lesson highlights: "This I recall to my mind, therefore have I hope. It is of the LORD's mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness. The LORD is my portion, saith my soul; therefore will I hope in him" (3:21–24). "It is good that a man should both hope and quietly wait for the salvation of the LORD" (3:26). "For he doth not afflict willingly nor grieve the children of men" (3:33).

Even here, the academic scholar says, the text is uncertain. The Hebrew "we are not consumed" is often emended, following the Targum and the Syriac, to "they [the mercies] have not ceased." That turns a statement about survival into a statement about God's character.

The rabbi tells where Jews say these words. The morning prayer Modeh ani, said before getting out of bed, ends with "great is thy faithfulness," from 3:23. We take the brightest line from the darkest book and say it with our eyes barely open. The practical disciple notes that 3:23 is the line Thomas Chisholm turned into the 1923 hymn "Great Is Thy Faithfulness." He reads the passage as a description of endurance. Hope here is not a place you arrive and stay; it is something you "recall to my mind" on purpose, and because it is new every morning, it has to be received again every morning.

The lesson quotes President M. Russell Ballard's "The Joy of Hope Fulfilled" (October 1992) to those who "have lost all hope because of sin and transgression": "you can always have hope. Always." The doctrinal connector observes that Lamentations 3:21 makes hope a deliberate act. The practical disciple says what that looks like in practice: not one breakthrough, but a person who keeps recalling mercy between relapses into despair.

"He doth not afflict willingly" (3:33) has its strongest Restoration parallel, the doctrinal connector says, in Moses 7, where Enoch sees the God of heaven weep and asks how he can, being holy. The answer is agency: his children chose otherwise, and "wherefore should not the heavens weep, seeing these shall suffer?" (Moses 7:37). Lamentations shows God as both the one who strikes and the one who does not want to; Moses 7 shows how both can be true. The rabbi offers Abraham Joshua Heschel's idea of divine pathos, a God moved by what happens to his people. Read that way, Lamentations is not a theodicy that explains suffering but a record of grief on both sides of a covenant not yet repaired.

Wrestle: does the turn hold? (3:34–66)

Most readers stop at verse 33. Every essay on the panel asks you to keep going.

What comes next. "Let us search and try our ways, and turn again to the LORD" (3:40). Then: "We have transgressed and have rebelled: thou hast not pardoned" (3:42). The academic scholar points out that the verb for "pardon" is the same one God uses in the new-covenant promise, "I will forgive their iniquity" (Jeremiah 31:34). The promise of Session 1 and the complaint of Session 5 use one word. Then: "Thou hast covered thyself with a cloud, that our prayer should not pass through" (3:44). The chapter ends with a plea to "persecute and destroy them in anger" (3:66).

One voice, not the verdict. The LDS scholar: The confidence of 3:22–33 is one voice in an argument, not its verdict, and Jewish liturgy knows it. The doctrinal connector, from inside Restoration faith, says the same: Verses 22–33 are one voice in the poem, not its conclusion. The academic scholar cites Tod Linafelt, who shifts attention from the hopeful man of chapter 3 to Daughter Zion's unanswered complaint in chapters 1–2, and traces how later Jewish literature kept trying to supply the answer the book withholds. On such readings, 3:22–33 is one voice in a contested conversation, not its verdict. The honest questioner adds Kathleen O'Connor's view that the hope of chapter 3 is one voice among several and that God's silence is part of what lets the book hold sorrow honestly.

What the synagogue does. On Tisha B'Av the whole book is read, including its last verse: "But thou hast utterly rejected us; thou art very wroth against us" (5:22). Then the congregation repeats the verse before it: "Turn thou us unto thee, O LORD, and we shall be turned; renew our days as of old" (5:21). Rashi explains that because the book ends in reproof, the previous verse is said again. The rabbi: The tradition will not pretend the last word is gentle. It simply refuses to let it be the last thing said. The academic: The tradition did not alter the text; it answered it. Notice that "Turn thou us... and we shall be turned" is the prayer of Ephraim from Session 1 (31:18).

What a reader can do. The honest questioner offers two choices: choose hope while leaving the hard verse in place, as the synagogue does, or let "Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by?" stand as a question still open. Both responses have deep roots in faith. The practical disciple adds that the whole of chapter 3, with its relapse after the turn, is honest about how endurance goes.

Where the panel ends

The panel ends close together. The LDS scholar sees Lamentations as the Bible's fullest voice from inside the catastrophe that Lehi's family escaped, a catastrophe Lehi knew only by vision (2 Nephi 1:4). Its anonymous poets and unresolved theology do not weaken it. Anonymous poets and an unresolved theology do not diminish that; they make the book truer to grief. Jeremiah 31 promises that mourning will turn to joy, and Lamentations lets "great is thy faithfulness" and "thou hast not pardoned" stand within twenty verses of each other. Neither book claims the turn has already happened.

The academic scholar puts the two books side by side the same way. One promises that mourning will turn to joy. The other records what the mourning sounded like before anyone knew whether it would. The doctrinal connector notices the order: in Jeremiah the oracle of 31:13 comes before the ruin, but in a reader's life it has to come after, and a covenant written in the heart is what keeps a person holding on in between.

The practical disciple closes the whole week in one sentence. Buy the field, pad the ropes, rewrite the scroll, don't pass by, and recall mercy again tomorrow morning, because it will need recalling.

Think deeply.

1. "Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by?" (1:12). Who in your ward, family, or office is past the casserole stage and into the silence? What will you put on your calendar for the third month?
2. Lamentations blames the city for its own ruin while describing its starving children. Have you ever explained someone's suffering by their sins, out loud or in your head? What would it have meant to be a witness instead of an explainer?
3. Can you let someone, perhaps yourself, say verse 8 or verse 44 out loud, "he shutteth out my prayer," without correcting them? What do you think God does with a prayer like that?
4. "This I recall to my mind, therefore have I hope" (3:21). Hope here is something you do on purpose, every morning. What is your actual morning practice for receiving mercy that is new every morning? What would you change about it?
5. The synagogue reads the bleak last verse and then repeats the prayer before it. Is there a hard verse, or a hard fact about your own life, that you have been skipping? What would you say after it, without deleting it?
6. Jeremiah 31 promised joy before the ruin; Lamentations records the ruin before anyone knew whether joy would come. Which of the two are you living in right now? What, written in your heart, is keeping you holding on in between?