Panel essay · Jeremiah 31–39; Lamentations · October 26–November 1, 2026 · Honest questioner
Written by an AI persona that surfaces the hard questions honestly — not a real person.
Jeremiah 36 tells a story that should make every careful reader of this week's chapters a little uneasy, in a productive way. A king sits by a winter brazier; every time his secretary reads "three or four leaves," he slices them off with a penknife and feeds them to the fire "until all the roll was consumed" (36:22–23). The prophet's response is not to mourn a lost original. He dictates the whole thing again to Baruch, "and there were added besides unto them many like words" (36:32).
That verse opens most of the hard questions in this block. The book grew, and it survives in more than one form. Some of its predictions did not land as worded, its ethics are uncomfortable in places, and its last poems refuse to resolve. What follows gives the strongest version of each problem and the range of faithful and critical responses, without trying to settle them.
The book of Jeremiah survives in two noticeably different editions. The Hebrew Masoretic Text, behind the King James Version, is longer. The Greek Septuagint is shorter by roughly a seventh, about 3,000 fewer words, and it arranges the material differently: the oracles against the nations sit in the middle of the book (after 25:13) rather than near the end. For a long time the obvious guess was that the Greek translators abridged. The Dead Sea Scrolls changed that. Two Hebrew fragments from Qumran Cave 4, 4QJer-b and 4QJer-d, agree with the shorter Greek form against the Masoretic one. So a short Hebrew Jeremiah really did exist. Emanuel Tov, a leading textual critic of the Hebrew Bible, argues that the Greek reflects an earlier Hebrew edition and that the Masoretic Text is a later, expanded second edition.
This week's reading contains the most famous of those expansions. All of Jeremiah 33:14–26 is missing from the Septuagint. That is the passage promising that "David shall never want a man to sit upon the throne" and that the Levites will never lack a priest "to do sacrifice continually" (33:17–18), guaranteed by God's "covenant of the day, and... of the night" (33:20). J. Gerald Janzen's study of the text concluded that the paragraph was added to the proto-Masoretic line after the two traditions split. W. J. Wessels points out that 33:15–16 reworks the earlier "Branch" oracle of 23:5–6, moving the focus from the king to the city, which now carries the name "The LORD our righteousness." He also proposes that the reworking was partly a way to cope with a promise that had not yet been fulfilled.
There are several faithful ways to hold this. One is that inspired expansion is exactly what 36:32 describes: Jeremiah himself, or Baruch, or later disciples speaking in his name, added "many like words," and the longer edition is no less scripture for being later. Conservative scholars also note that the passage's language and themes fit comfortably in Jeremiah, so being absent from one textual line does not prove it is foreign to the book. Latter-day Saints have a ready category, since the Eighth Article of Faith accepts the Bible "as far as it is translated correctly." The critical reading is simpler: some of what the King James Version presents as Jeremiah's words were composed by scribes generations later.
There is also a question specific to Latter-day Saints. Nephi says the brass plates contained "many prophecies which have been spoken by the mouth of Jeremiah" (1 Nephi 5:13). Lehi left before Zedekiah's siege, so the plates could not have held the narratives of chapters 37–39 or the book in either of its finished forms. What they did hold is unknown, and it is worth saying so plainly.
Jeremiah 33:17 says David will "never want a man to sit upon the throne." After Zedekiah, no descendant of David ever sat on the throne of an independent Judah again. Christians read the verse messianically, with the Branch of 33:15 fulfilled in Jesus, and Jewish tradition reads it as still pending. Both readings shift a statement about an unbroken line onto a future king; whether that is fulfillment or reinterpretation is the reader's call.
The same issue comes up in the narrative. After Jehoiakim burns the scroll, the word comes: "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). Yet his son Coniah (Jehoiachin) did take the throne, and Jeremiah 37:1 mentions him without comment. Second Kings 24:6 reports that Jehoiakim "slept with his fathers," the ordinary formula for a natural death. The usual apologetic answer is that a three-month reign ended by surrender and exile does not count as truly sitting on the throne, and that no descendant of Jehoiakim reigned after 586. Critics answer that this redefines "sit" after the fact. The prophecy is fulfilled only in a loose sense, and readers should know they are choosing how loose a sense to accept.
Jeremiah 31:29–30 retires an old proverb: "The fathers have eaten a sour grape, and the children's teeth are set on edge." In the new day, "every one shall die for his own iniquity." This is a real moral advance, and Ezekiel 18 develops it at length. But one chapter later Jeremiah prays to a God who "recompensest the iniquity of the fathers into the bosom of their children after them" (32:18), echoing the Decalogue (Exodus 20:5). And the narrative ends with exactly that kind of recompense. At Riblah, "the king of Babylon slew the sons of Zedekiah... before his eyes," then blinded the king so that this would be the last thing he ever saw (39:6–7). The sons did nothing; the father refused to surrender.
One way to reconcile this is to place 31:29–30 in the future ("in those days") and read it as a promise that the present order of collective consequence will someday end, not as a description of how things already work. Another is to say that Babylon did this, not God, and that the text describes what happens to a nation without approving of it. The first chapter of Lamentations, though, says outright that "the LORD hath afflicted her" (1:5). The tension is not just between ancient and modern ethics. It runs through Jeremiah itself, and readers should be allowed to notice it.
The princes have a case in 38:4. Jeremiah is publicly telling a besieged city that "he that goeth forth to the Chaldeans shall live" (38:2), which means: desert. In any siege, that is sedition. "He weakeneth the hands of the men of war," they say, and they are not wrong about the effect, only, the narrator insists, about the source. They believed they were defending their homes.
Then there is 38:24–27. Zedekiah gives Jeremiah a cover story about his prison conditions, and when the princes question him, Jeremiah "told them according to all these words that the king had commanded." Some readers defend this as a partial truth (he had made that request in 37:20) told to men who wanted him dead. Others see an honest portrait of a frightened man. The text makes no judgment.
This is the controversy Latter-day Saints are most likely to run into online. The Book of Mormon says a son of Zedekiah named Mulek escaped the destruction and reached the Americas (Mosiah 25:2; Helaman 8:21). The Bible says the Babylonians killed Zedekiah's sons in front of him (39:6; 2 Kings 25:7). Critics call this a contradiction.
Read 39:6 carefully. It says the king of Babylon "slew the sons of Zedekiah," then "also... slew all the nobles of Judah." The word "all" appears with the nobles and not with the sons. FAIR, a Latter-day Saint apologetics organization, argues that this difference leaves room for a surviving son. Robert F. Smith's FARMS note pointed to Jeremiah 38:6, where Jeremiah is lowered into "the dungeon of Malchiah the son of Hammelech." "Hammelech" is not a personal name. In Hebrew, Malkiyahu ben hammelek means "Malkiyahu, son of the king." Jeffrey R. Chadwick went further. He discussed a stamp seal reading "belonging to Malkiyahu, son of the king," argued that the king in question could be Zedekiah, and calculated that Zedekiah, who was 21 at his accession (2 Kings 24:18) and 32 when the city fell, could have had a son of 15 or 16.
The objections deserve equal space. A missing "all" is thin evidence. "Mulek" and "Malkiyahu" are related forms but not the same name, so identifying the two is a hypothesis. The Malkiyahu of 38:6 owns a cistern in the court of the prison, which suggests an established figure, and "son of the king" may have worked partly as a court title for members of the royal house. That would make it hard to say which king was meant. By Chadwick's own account, the seal did not come from a controlled excavation. It surfaced on the antiquities market in a 1991 catalog, and he suggests it was probably dug up illegally in the 1980s. The fair summary is that Jeremiah 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.
Clay seal impressions (bullae) bearing names from Jeremiah 36 fall into two very different evidentiary categories.
The bulla reading "belonging to Gemaryahu son of Shaphan" was excavated by Yigal Shiloh in the City of David in 1982, one of 51 bullae in a building burned in the Babylonian destruction. A controlled dig, a datable layer, and a match for "Gemariah the son of Shaphan the scribe," from whose chamber Baruch read (36:10): solid evidence that the story's officials belong to the right time and place.
The famous "Berekhyahu son of Neriyahu the scribe" bulla, matching Baruch son of Neriah, came from antiquities dealers with no known findspot. In 2014 Yuval Goren and Eran Arie published laboratory analyses of it and a second Berekhyahu bulla and concluded that both are modern forgeries. The debate continues, but "Baruch's seal has been found" is a disputed claim, with the same provenance problem as the Mulek seal.
"Behold, the days come... that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah" (31:31). Hebrews 8 quotes all of 31:31–34 and draws the conclusion that "he hath made the first old" (Hebrews 8:13). For much of Christian history, that line supported supersessionism: the belief that the Church replaced Israel and that the covenant with the Jews had lapsed.
Jewish readers have answered directly from Jeremiah's own words. The covenant is made "with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah," not with a new people. What gets written on the heart is "my law," torati, my Torah, which suggests the same commandments internalized, not abolished. And the promise that "they shall all know me" and no longer need to teach one another (31:34) plainly has not happened, so the passage looks forward to a messianic future. Rabbi Dovid Rosenfeld makes these points for a popular audience. Alon Goshen-Gottstein observes that the passage had little life in classical Jewish interpretation outside medieval polemic against Christian readings. Christian institutions have moved too. The Vatican's Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews, in its 2015 document "The Gifts and the Calling of God Are Irrevocable," affirms that God's covenant with Israel has never been revoked.
Latter-day Saints sit at an unusual angle. The lesson ties 31:31 to the "new and everlasting covenant," and Restoration theology stresses gathering the literal house of Israel, which 31:36 says will never cease "from being a nation before me for ever." That gives Saints reason to share the Jewish objection to replacement, while their claim of a restored covenant brings back a softer version of what Jewish readers resist. At minimum, notice that the passage is addressed, word for word, to someone else first.
Tradition assigns Lamentations to Jeremiah. The Septuagint opens the book with Jeremiah sitting and weeping, and the Talmud states that "Jeremiah wrote his own book, and the book of Kings, and Lamentations" (Bava Batra 15a). The Hebrew book itself names no author, and most modern scholars doubt Jeremiah wrote it. Chapters 1–4 are alphabetic acrostics, and chapter 3 is a triple acrostic (three verses per letter, 66 in all), which looks more like crafted communal liturgy than one prophet's private grief. The chapter headings in the Church's edition ("Jeremiah laments...") are modern editorial summaries, not part of the text.
The deeper problem is theological. In Lamentations, God is not absent; God is the attacker. "He was unto me as a bear lying in wait, and as a lion in secret places... He hath bent his bow, and set me as a mark for the arrow" (3:10–12). "When I cry and shout, he shutteth out my prayer" (3:8). The book also accepts the explanation that the city earned it: "Jerusalem hath grievously sinned; therefore she is removed" (1:8). It does this 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.
The usual devotional move, and the lesson's own move, is to make 3:22–33 the center: "his compassions fail not. They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness." Those verses are real and beautiful. But the poem does not stay there. Eleven verses later the speaker says, "Thou hast covered thyself with a cloud, that our prayer should not pass through" (3:44), and the chapter ends asking God to "persecute and destroy them in anger" (3:66). Tod Linafelt argues that interpreters have long elevated the patient, submissive man of chapter 3 over personified Zion in chapters 1–2, who refuses comfort and demands a response for her dying children, and that the book never supplies that response. Kathleen O'Connor argues that the hope of chapter 3 is one voice among several, not the book's resolution, and that God's silence is part of what lets the book hold sorrow honestly.
Jewish practice handles the ending in its own way. When Lamentations (Eikhah) is chanted on Tisha B'Av, the congregation repeats 5:21, "Turn thou us unto thee, O LORD," after the bleak final verse. As the custom is usually explained, this keeps the reading from ending on a note of rebuke. That is a tradition choosing hope while leaving the hard verse in place. A reader this week can do the same, or can let "Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by?" (1:12) stand as a question that is still open. Both responses have deep roots in faith.