Panel essay · Jeremiah 31–39; Lamentations · October 26–November 1, 2026 · Doctrinal connector
Written by an AI persona connecting the block to Restoration scripture and modern teaching — not a real person.
This week's chapters are set in the Jerusalem Lehi's family left. Nephi dates his father's call to "the commencement of the first year of the reign of Zedekiah" (1 Nephi 1:4), the same Zedekiah who in Jeremiah 37–39 interviews the prophet in secret and then watches his sons die at Riblah. The brass plates Lehi's sons carried away held "many prophecies which have been spoken by the mouth of Jeremiah" (1 Nephi 5:13), and Nephi tells his brothers that "Jeremiah have they cast into prison" (1 Nephi 7:14). Jeremiah is the prophet who stayed behind while the founding family of a second scripture went into the wilderness, and nearly every theme in this block has a Restoration counterpart.
Jeremiah 31:31–34 is the only place in the Old Testament that uses the phrase "new covenant." It is not according to the covenant God made "in the day that I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt; which my covenant they brake" (31:32). The new one is internal: "I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts" (31:33). Teaching becomes unnecessary because "they shall all know me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them" (31:34). Chapter 32 calls it "an everlasting covenant" in which God will "put my fear in their hearts, that they shall not depart from me" (32:40).
Hebrews 8:8–12 quotes the passage in full and draws the conclusion that the first covenant is "ready to vanish away" (Hebrews 8:13). That reading has fed a long Christian supersessionism, the idea that the Church replaced Israel. Jewish readers rightly answer that Jeremiah addresses the covenant to "the house of Israel, and… the house of Judah" (31:31), and that the next verses swear Israel will last as long as the sun and moon (31:35–37).
Restoration scripture offers a reading that neither replaces Israel nor makes the covenant a novelty. When the Lord told early converts that their earlier baptisms would not do, He said: "all old covenants have I caused to be done away in this thing; and 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. D&C 66:2 calls it "mine everlasting covenant, even the fulness of my gospel… as it was written by the prophets and apostles in days of old." Read that way, Jeremiah's "new" covenant is a renewal of what Israel had at the start and lost, not a replacement of Israel.
Elder Alan R. Walker's April 2026 talk "A Peculiar Treasure" starts from the covenant Jeremiah calls broken: Sinai. Walker reads Exodus 19:5 as setting "two simple but powerful conditions: to obey His voice and to keep our covenants with Him." Walker never mentions Jeremiah, but the texts 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 the question Jeremiah 31:33 raises: "Are the truths of the Savior's gospel written in the fleshy tables of our hearts?" The phrase comes from 2 Corinthians 3:3, where Paul is already reading Jeremiah (compare 2 Corinthians 3:6). Bednar pairs it with Alma's questions: "Have ye received his image in your countenances? Have ye experienced this mighty change in your hearts?" (Alma 5:14). The "mighty change" (Mosiah 5:2) is the Nephite name for Jeremiah's heart-written law.
Jeremiah 31:34 promises that everyone will know the Lord without being taught. Doctrine and Covenants 84 makes that concrete: it says the greater priesthood "holdeth the key of the mysteries of the kingdom, even the key of the knowledge of God. Therefore, in the ordinances thereof, the power of godliness is manifest" (D&C 84:19–20). The same section takes up Jeremiah's own words, looking toward a day "until all shall know me, who remain, even from the least unto the greatest" (D&C 84:98). In Latter-day Saint teaching, the temple is where that knowledge is received, not merely taught by "every man his neighbour" (31:34).
The same revelation turns Jeremiah's warning on the Church itself: early members were under condemnation "until they repent and remember the new covenant, even the Book of Mormon… not only to say, but to do" (D&C 84:57). A covenant kept only on paper is exactly what Jeremiah says the fathers broke.
Chapter 33 carries the temple theme further, and here the text history matters. Jeremiah 33:18 promises that "neither shall the priests the Levites want a man before me to offer burnt offerings… and to do sacrifice continually," a covenant as fixed as day and night (33:20–21). These verses belong to 33:14–26, the longest passage in Hebrew Jeremiah with no counterpart in the Greek Septuagint, which many scholars treat as a later expansion within the Jeremiah tradition (see Johanna Erzberger's study below).
Whatever its origin, the Restoration took up that promise directly. 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 speaks of "the sons of Moses and also the sons of Aaron" offering "an acceptable offering and sacrifice in the house of the Lord," and makes faithful priesthood holders those sons. Joseph Smith later named that offering: "a book containing the records of our dead" presented in the temple (D&C 128:24). Jeremiah pictures altar smoke; the Restoration reads the promise as temple work for Israel's families, living and dead.
With the Babylonian army at the walls (32:2) and Jeremiah confined in the court of the prison, his cousin Hanameel comes to sell him the family field at Anathoth, citing "the right of redemption" (32:7). Jeremiah pays, signs, seals, and gives Baruch both copies of the deed, "both which is sealed, and this evidence which is open," to put "in an earthen vessel, that they may continue many days" (32:11, 14). The point is spelled out: "Houses and fields and vineyards shall be possessed again in this land" (32:15).
Two Restoration connections stand out. First, the language of redemption. Hanameel's "right of redemption" is the kinsman's duty to buy back family land so it is not lost to the family (Leviticus 25:25). It is the same idea as the goʼel, the redeemer, behind the Book of Mormon's insistence that "redemption cometh in and through the Holy Messiah" (2 Nephi 2:6). 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.
Second, Jeremiah's prayer. After the purchase he prays, "Ah Lord GOD!… there is nothing too hard for thee" (32:17), though he plainly does not understand the command (32:25). God hands his words back as a question: "is there any thing too hard for me?" (32:27). About a decade earlier, on the road back to Jerusalem, Nephi had told his rebellious brothers that "the Lord is able to do all things according to his will, for the children of men, 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).
Jeremiah dictates and Baruch writes "with ink in the book" (36:18). King Jehoiakim, warming himself by the hearth, cuts off each section as Jehudi reads it and burns the whole scroll (36:22–23). "They were not afraid, nor rent their garments" (36:24). Jehoiakim's father Josiah had torn his clothes at a scroll's reading (2 Kings 22:11). Then God tells Jeremiah to dictate it again, "and there were added besides unto them many like words" (36:32).
Latter-day Saints have their own lost manuscript: the 116 pages Martin Harris lost in 1828. The Lord's answer goes the other way from Jeremiah 36: "you shall not translate again those words which have gone forth out of your hands" (D&C 10:30). Instead the lost material is replaced by a parallel account already "engraven upon the plates of Nephi" that is "more particular" about what matters (D&C 10:38, 40). In both cases the record ends up fuller than before, and Joseph's replacement, the small plates, is the very account of Lehi's Jerusalem that connects to this week. The Lord's promise in 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."
Jeremiah 36:32 also openly says the book was expanded. A reader who believes "because that ye have a Bible ye need not suppose that it contains all my words" (2 Nephi 29:10) need not be unsettled by the Hebrew and Greek forms of Jeremiah differing in length; the book itself says it grew.
The lesson asks readers to "compare what happened to Zedekiah with what happened to Lehi's family in 1 Nephi 1–2," and the comparison is sharp. Zedekiah believes Jeremiah enough to ask him in secret, "Is there any word from the LORD?" (37:17). He is told exactly how to save his life and the city (38:17), and he admits what stops him: "I am afraid of the Jews that are fallen to the Chaldeans… lest they… mock me" (38:19). When he finally flees, he is caught near Jericho, his sons are killed "before his eyes," and then his eyes are put out (39:5–7). Lehi got the same message, warning that Jerusalem "must be destroyed" (1 Nephi 1:4), was mocked for it (1 Nephi 1:19), and left anyway. One king trusted the prophet privately and disobeyed him publicly. One father obeyed and left "his gold, and his silver, and his precious things" behind (1 Nephi 2:4).
Jeremiah 39:6 says "the king of Babylon slew the sons of Zedekiah." The Book of Mormon claims one survived: Samuel the Lamanite asks, "Will ye say that the sons of Zedekiah were not slain, all except it were Mulek?" (Helaman 8:21), and the people of Zarahemla descend from him (Mosiah 25:2; Omni 1:15). The Bible mentions no survivor, and that should not be glossed over, though neither does it say every son was at Riblah. Jeffrey R. Chadwick has pointed to Jeremiah 38:6, where Jeremiah is lowered into "the dungeon of Malchiah the son of Hammelech," in Hebrew Malkiyahu ben-hammelek, "Malkiyahu son of the king." Chadwick argues that ben hammelek denotes a biological royal son rather than a court title, and he connects a seal reading "belonging to Malkiyahu, son of the king" with Mulek, who he suggests left the city before it fell. By Chadwick's own account the seal came through the antiquities market around 1991, not a controlled excavation, so it is suggestive at best. Mulek's survival remains a Book of Mormon claim the Bible neither confirms nor rules out.
Ebed-melech, the Cushite eunuch, is a foreigner and by Deuteronomy 23:1 an outsider to the assembly. He is the one courtier in chapter 38 willing to say "these men have done evil" (38:9). His reward comes "because thou hast put thy trust in me" (39:18). Nephi's statement that the Lord "denieth none that come unto him, black and white, bond and free, male and female… and all are alike unto God" (2 Nephi 26:33) has a living example here.
Joseph Smith made no changes to Lamentations in his Bible translation (Robert J. Matthews, Encyclopedia of Mormonism), and the Restoration does not soften it. Lamentations 3 opens with God as an attacker: a bear, a lion, an archer whose arrows have entered "my reins" (3:10–13). "When I cry and shout, he shutteth out my prayer" (3:8). The famous turn comes at verses 21–33: "his compassions fail not. They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness… he doth not afflict willingly." But the poem does not end there. It goes back to accusation, "Thou hast covered thyself with a cloud, that our prayer should not pass through" (3:44), and closes by asking God to "persecute and destroy them in anger" (3:66). Verses 22–33 are one voice in the poem, not its conclusion.
The Restoration has its own lament from a dungeon. 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; the speaker of Lamentations 3:55 likewise cries "out of the low dungeon," and Jeremiah sank in one (38:6). 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" (D&C 121:7). Lamentations 3:57 has the same answer in brief, "thou saidst, Fear not"; D&C 121 sets it inside a plan in which affliction is "a small moment."
Lamentations 3:33, "he doth not afflict willingly nor grieve the children of men," has its strongest Restoration parallel in Moses 7. There Enoch sees that "the God of heaven… wept" over the coming flood and asks, "How is it that thou canst weep, seeing thou art holy?" (Moses 7:28–29). The answer is agency: God commanded His children "that they should choose me, their Father" (Moses 7:32–33); they chose otherwise. "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 judgment is the result of chosen sin, and the God who allows it weeps.
That is the setting for President M. Russell Ballard's "The Joy of Hope Fulfilled" (October 1992), quoted in the lesson. Speaking to those who have "lost all hope because of sin and transgression," he insisted, "you can always have hope. Always." Lamentations 3:21 makes hope a deliberate act: "This I recall to my mind, therefore have I hope." The chapter holds both a prayer shut out (3:44) and a voice heard (3:56). What the Restoration adds is Jeremiah 31's promise heard from the other side of the disaster. The mourning of Lamentations 1, where Jerusalem has "none to comfort her" (1:2, 17, 21), meets the oracle of 31:13: "I will turn their mourning into joy, and will comfort them." In Jeremiah the oracle comes before the ruin. In the reader's experience it must come after, and a covenant written in the heart is what keeps a person holding on in between.