Panel essay · Jeremiah 31–39; Lamentations · October 26–November 1, 2026 · Academic scholar
Written by an AI persona in the voice of a non-Latter-day-Saint Hebrew Bible academic — not a real scholar.
This week's nine chapters come from two books, three genres, and at least two editions of one of those books. Jeremiah 31–33 is poetry and prose of promise. Jeremiah 36–39 is a narrative about a prophet, a scribe, two kings, and a siege. Lamentations 1 and 3 are alphabetic poems written after the city fell. The place to start is a fact most readers of an English Bible never learn: there is more than one Book of Jeremiah.
The Septuagint, the Greek translation made by Jews in the last centuries BCE, has a markedly shorter Jeremiah than the Hebrew Masoretic Text behind the King James Version. Emanuel Tov, the leading authority on the text of the Hebrew Bible, estimates the Masoretic Text is about 20 percent longer. The two also arrange their material differently. The oracles against foreign nations come near the end of the Hebrew (chapters 46–51) but sit in the middle of the Greek, right after 25:13. That shift renumbers everything after it, so this week's chapter 31 is chapter 38 in the Greek.
One could once argue that the Greek translator simply abridged. The Dead Sea Scrolls weakened that argument badly. Two Hebrew fragments from Qumran, 4QJer-b and 4QJer-d, are shorter than the Masoretic Text in several details, and in Jeremiah 10 they arrange the verses as the Greek does. A short Hebrew Jeremiah really existed. Tov's influential analysis (1985) argues that the short form is an earlier edition and the Masoretic Text a second, expanded one. Qumran kept copies of both.
This week's block contains the single largest example. Jeremiah 33:14–26, the promise that "David shall never want a man to sit upon the throne" and that the Levitical priests will never lack a man to offer sacrifice (33:17–18), has no counterpart in the Greek. Johanna Erzberger (Old Testament Essays, 2013) calls it the longest of the passages attested only in the Masoretic Text and argues that it was added, not dropped. It reworks the "righteous Branch" oracle of 23:5–6 with a telling shift. In chapter 23 the Branch "shall reign as king"; in 33:15 he only "shall execute judgment and righteousness," and the royal promise now runs alongside an equal promise to the priests (33:21). That fits a later period, when the monarchy was gone and the priesthood was the institution that survived.
The narrative shows the same pattern. Jeremiah 39:4–13, covering Zedekiah's flight, his capture at Riblah, and Jeremiah's release, is also missing from the Greek. It closely parallels 2 Kings 25 and Jeremiah 52, which suggests the story was later filled out from Kings.
Jeremiah 36 may be the most self-aware chapter in the prophetic literature. In "the fourth year of Jehoiakim" (36:1), about 605 BCE, the year of Babylon's victory at Carchemish (46:2), Jeremiah dictates his oracles: "Baruch wrote from the mouth of Jeremiah" (36:4). When the officials ask how, Baruch answers with almost bureaucratic precision: "He pronounced all these words unto me with his mouth, and I wrote them with ink in the book" (36:18).
Then the winter palace. As Jehudi reads "three or four leaves" (Hebrew delatot, "doors," the columns of a scroll), they are cut off with a scribe's knife and burned "until all the roll was consumed" (36:23). The narrator sets this against Josiah, Jehoiakim's father, who tore his clothes when a scroll was read to him (2 Kings 22:11): here "they were not afraid, nor rent their garments" (36:24). Then the verse that interests historians most: Jeremiah dictates the scroll again, "and there were added besides unto them many like words" (36:32).
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 distinguished poetic oracles (his source A), third-person prose narratives about the prophet (source B, including chapters 36–45), and prose sermons in a Deuteronomistic style (source C). Baruch was long the favorite candidate for author of the B narratives, though Mowinckel himself later gave that up. William McKane's International Critical Commentary (1986) pushed further with a "rolling corpus": small units of Jeremianic material set off new expansions by later hands, through catchwords and recurring themes. Chapter 36 fits every one of these models, because it says outright that the scroll grew.
Jeremiah 36–39 is crowded with officials, and some of their names have turned up in the ground. In 1982 Yigal Shiloh's excavation in the City of David found a room of clay bullae, seal impressions from papyrus documents that the Babylonian fire destroyed while baking the clay hard. One reads "Gemaryahu son of Shaphan," the official from whose chamber Baruch read the scroll (36:10). It came from a controlled excavation, so its context is secure.
The famous "Berekhyahu son of Neriyahu the scribe" bulla, Baruch with the full theophoric form of his name, is a different story. It surfaced on the antiquities market and was published by Nahman Avigad in 1978, together with a bulla of "Yerahmeʼel son of the king," the name of the officer Jehoiakim sends to arrest Baruch and Jeremiah (36:26). In 2014 Yuval Goren and Eran Arie published laboratory analyses of the two known Berekhyahu bullae (BASOR 372) and concluded they are modern creations, citing technological errors and anachronisms. Others have contested that verdict in print, but nothing should rest on the Baruch bulla. An artifact with no findspot that confirms a biblical name exactly deserves more suspicion, not less.
Jeremiah 39:3 offers a better-grounded match. Among the Babylonian officers who sit in the middle gate is one the KJV splits into "Samgar-nebo, Sarsechim, Rab-saris." In 2007 the Assyriologist Michael Jursa identified, in a British Museum tablet dated to Nebuchadnezzar's tenth year (595 BCE), a payment of gold by Nabu-sharrussu-ukin, the rab ša-rēši or chief eunuch. Read with a corrected word division, the Hebrew gives the same man: "Nebo-sarsekim the Rab-saris." The tablet is a routine temple receipt that sat unread in the museum's collections for more than a century, and that ordinariness is what makes it valuable.
In 38:6 Jeremiah is lowered into "the dungeon of Malchiah the son of Hammelech," Hebrew ben-hammelekh, "son of the king." Whether that phrase means literal royal paternity or is a title for a royal official has long been debated. The Latter-day Saint scholar Jeffrey R. Chadwick (Journal of Book of Mormon Studies, 2003) has connected a stamp seal reading "belonging to Malkiyahu son of the king" with the Book of Mormon's Mulek. That seal also comes from a private collection without provenance. Jeremiah 39:6 says only that "the king of Babylon slew the sons of Zedekiah in Riblah before his eyes"; it does not say every son was there. Mainstream scholarship has not engaged the Mulek question, and the biblical text neither confirms nor excludes it.
The historical frame is unusually well documented. The Babylonian Chronicle ABC 5 records that in Nebuchadnezzar's seventh year he took "the city of Judah" on the second of Adar, mid-March 597 BCE, 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 with a breach of the wall about eighteen months later (39:2), in 587 or 586 depending on how one reconciles the calendars. The surviving chronicle tablets do not cover that second siege.
In 1935 J. L. Starkey found ostraca at Lachish. In Letter 4 an officer writes that he is watching for the fire signals of Lachish "because we cannot see Azeqah." Jeremiah 34:7 names Lachish and Azekah as the last fortified cities still holding out. Letter 6 complains that the words of the princes "weaken the hands" of the people, the very idiom the princes use against Jeremiah in 38:4, here turned against them.
Jeremiah 32 belongs to this siege, and its legal detail is precise. The cousin invokes the "right of redemption" (32:7, geʼullah), the kinship 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, "that which was sealed… and that which was open" (32:11): the so-called double document, one copy sealed against tampering and one left readable, a format attested in later Aramaic and Judean legal papyri. Storing 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.
Jeremiah 31:31–34 is the only place in the Hebrew Bible that uses the phrase "new covenant" (berit hadashah). In its setting it answers a concrete problem: the Sinai covenant had visibly failed, "which my covenant they brake" (31:32). The promise is that Torah will be internalized, "in their inward parts," so that teaching becomes unnecessary (31:34). The recipients are "the house of Israel, and… the house of Judah" (31:31), and the content is not a new law but the same Torah ("my law") held in a new way.
A small textual detail shows how much depends on which edition one reads. Where the Hebrew says "although I was an husband unto them" (baʻalti), the Greek reads "and I neglected them." That probably reflects a Hebrew gaʻalti, one letter different. 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. Jewish interpreters have consistently answered that the text promises renewal to the same people, not their replacement. Read historically, the passage makes no argument about Christianity at all.
The Hebrew book of Lamentations (ʼEkhah, "How…!") is anonymous. The attribution to Jeremiah comes from the Greek translation's preface 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 five poems differ in style and viewpoint and were probably composed in Judah after 586. One can still see what prompted the tradition. The speaker of Lamentations 3 says, "They have cut off my life in the dungeon" (3:53) and calls to God "out of the low dungeon" (3:55), and the Hebrew word there, bor, is the "pit" or cistern of Jeremiah 38:6.
Chapters 1–4 are alphabetic acrostics. Each of the 22 verses of chapter 1 opens with the next letter of the alphabet; chapter 3 is a triple acrostic, three lines per letter, 66 verses. Commentators often suggest the form imposes order on a catastrophe that has none, grief told from aleph to tav. The form also holds a historical clue. In chapters 2–4 pe precedes ʻayin, the order found in Iron Age Israelite abecedaries such as those from ʻIzbet Sartah and Kuntillet ʻAjrud. The Qumran scroll 4QLam has pe first in chapter 1 too, which suggests the Masoretic chapter 1 was later brought into line with the standard alphabet. In 1882 Karl Budde identified the "limping" qinah rhythm, a long line answered by a shorter one, as the meter of the Hebrew dirge; how strictly it applies is still debated.
The genre has ancient relatives. Sumerian laments written after the fall of Ur around 2000 BCE, the Lament for Urim and the Lament for Sumer and Urim, describe the great gods deciding the city's ruin, a destroying storm, deserted streets, and the goddess Ningal weeping over her ruined house. Lamentations 1 shares many of these motifs. The city is personified as a woman and a widow (1:1). Her festivals are empty (1:4). The enemy enters the sanctuary (1:10), and the destruction is the deity's own doing: "wherewith the LORD hath afflicted me in the day of his fierce anger" (1:12). F. W. Dobbs-Allsopp's Weep, O Daughter of Zion (1993) argues for a shared city-lament genre in the Bible and Mesopotamia. He sees the Israelite form as a native development, not a borrowing. 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).
Devotional readers treasure 3:22–33, and even here the text is uncertain. The Hebrew lo tamnu, "we are not consumed," is often emended to lo tammu, "they [the mercies] have not ceased," as the Targum and Syriac read it and many modern translations follow. That turns a statement about survival into a statement about God's character.
The larger question is structural. Lamentations 3 opens with God as an attacker. He is a bear lying in wait, an archer, one who "shutteth out my prayer" (3:8, 10–12). The center affirms that "he doth not afflict willingly" (3:33). Then the poem keeps going. The communal voice confesses, "We have transgressed and have rebelled," and the next half-line answers flatly, "thou hast not pardoned" (3:42). The verb is salah, the same one God uses in the new-covenant promise, "I will forgive their iniquity" (Jeremiah 31:34). Then comes "Thou hast covered thyself with a cloud, that our prayer should not pass through" (3:44), and the chapter ends in imprecation: "Persecute and destroy them in anger" (3:66). Tod Linafelt (Surviving Lamentations, 2000) shifts attention away from the hopeful man of chapter 3 to Daughter Zion's unanswered complaint in chapters 1–2, and he 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.
Jewish liturgy enacts the same tension. On Tishʻah beʼAv, after the final verse of ʼEkhah, the congregation repeats 5:21, "Turn thou us unto thee, O LORD." Rashi explains that because the book ends in reproof, the preceding verse is said again "to end on a note of consolation." The tradition did not alter the text; it answered it. That may be the most accurate way to hold Jeremiah 31 and Lamentations 3 together as well. One text promises that mourning will turn into joy. The other records what the mourning sounded like before anyone knew whether it would.