Panel essay · Jeremiah 31–39; Lamentations · October 26–November 1, 2026 · LDS scholar
Written by an AI persona in the voice of a Latter-day Saint academic — not a real scholar.
Two documents frame this week's reading. In Jeremiah 36 a king feeds a prophetic scroll into a brazier "three or four leaves" at a time until "all the roll was consumed in the fire" (36:23). In Jeremiah 32, with the Babylonian siege ramps already against the walls (32:24), a prophet in custody buys a field, signs and seals a deed, keeps an open copy, and has Baruch put both "in an earthen vessel, that they may continue many days" (32:14). One document is destroyed so that it cannot speak; the other is buried so that it can speak later. That pairing is a fair guide to what scholarship can tell a Latter-day Saint reader about these chapters: much of our evidence from Jeremiah's Jerusalem survived because it was burned or buried, and much of what we want to know went into the fire.
Jeremiah 36 is the Bible's most detailed account of a prophetic book being produced. Barred from the temple (36:5), the prophet dictates and Baruch writes: "He pronounced all these words unto me with his mouth, and I wrote them with ink in the book" (36:18). After it is burned, a second scroll is dictated, "and there were added besides unto them many like words" (36:32). By the book's own account, Jeremiah was a growing text from the start.
Textual criticism confirms that growth on a scale the chapter barely hints at. The Septuagint (the Greek translation made in the last centuries BCE) has a Jeremiah that is roughly one-seventh shorter than the Masoretic Hebrew text that stands behind the KJV, and it arranges material differently: most notably, the oracles against the nations come in the middle of the book instead of at the end. One could once blame a translator who abridged; the Dead Sea Scrolls ended that explanation. Two Hebrew fragments from Qumran Cave 4, 4QJer-b and 4QJer-d, preserve a Hebrew text matching the shorter Greek. In chapter 10, for example, 4QJer-b lacks verses 6–8 and 10 and places verse 9 where the Greek has it. Emanuel Tov argued in "The Literary History of the Book of Jeremiah in the Light of Its Textual History" that the Greek and these fragments preserve an earlier, shorter Hebrew edition, and that the Masoretic text is a later, expanded edition. The expansion, in his view, was deliberate editorial elaboration.
This week's block includes the two most famous Masoretic additions. Jeremiah 33:14–26, the promise that "David shall never want a man to sit upon the throne" and that the Levites will never lack a priest (33:17–18), is absent from the Greek. So are 39:4–13, which tell of Zedekiah's flight by night, the slaughter of his sons at Riblah, and Nebuzar-adan's release of Jeremiah. (The Greek does keep the Riblah account in chapter 52.) The Davidic passage reworks the "Branch" oracle of 23:5–6, and many scholars take it as the work of a later hand in the Persian period who, writing when no son of David sat on any throne, insisted that the covenant with David was as fixed as day and night (33:20–21).
In 1 Nephi 5:13 the brass plates already contain "many prophecies which have been spoken by the mouth of Jeremiah." That fits Jeremiah 36, which puts a written Jeremiah collection in Jehoiakim's fourth year (605 BCE), before Lehi left in Zedekiah's reign. It also means the Jeremiah Lehi carried was an early stage of a book that kept growing after him. Loren Blake Spendlove, writing in Interpreter in 2025, observes that the Masoretic edition attaches the title "the prophet" to Jeremiah's name far more often than the Greek does, and he notes that Nephi lists Jeremiah separately from "the holy prophets" in that same verse. Whatever one makes of Spendlove's full argument, 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.
One more textual point: Hebrews 8:8–12 quotes Jeremiah 31:31–34, but it quotes the Greek. Where the Hebrew of 31:32 says "although I was an husband unto them," Hebrews 8:9 reads "and I regarded them not." So the New Testament's most important use of this chapter rests on the Septuagint form of Jeremiah.
Because Judahite papyrus documents were sealed with lumps of clay, the 586 BCE destruction burned the documents and baked the seals. In 1982 Yigal Shiloh's excavation in the City of David found a room containing 51 bullae (clay seal impressions) in the destruction layer. One reads "Belonging to Gemaryahu son of Shaphan." As Tsvi Schneider noted in Biblical Archaeology Review (1991), it comes from a securely stratified context just before the conquest, and its owner is very plausibly the Gemariah son of Shaphan in whose chamber Baruch read the scroll (36:10) and who pleaded with the king not to burn it (36:25). The deeds of Jeremiah 32 were documents of exactly this kind: "sealed according to the law and custom" (32:11).
Eilat Mazar's excavations nearby produced bullae of "Jehucal son of Shelemiah" (2005) and "Gedaliah son of Pashhur" (2008). 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. From the Babylonian side, a cuneiform tablet in the British Museum, identified by Assyriologist Michael Jursa in 2007, records a gift by Nabu-sharussu-ukin, the rab ša-rēši (chief official), dated about eight years before the fall. Jursa argued that this is very probably the "Sarsechim, Rab-saris" of Jeremiah 39:3. Name and title match, and the name is rare.
The famous bulla of "Berekhyahu son of Neriyahu the scribe," Baruch with his full theophoric name, is a different case. Like a companion bulla of "Yerahmeʼel son of the king" (compare "Jerahmeel the son of Hammelech," 36:26), it came from a group bought on the antiquities market and has no archaeological context. In 2014 Yuval Goren and Eran Arie published a laboratory study in the Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research concluding that the two Berekhyahu bullae are modern forgeries. Peter van der Veen, Robert Deutsch, and Gabriel Barkay published a rejoinder in 2016 defending them. The Baruch bulla belongs in the "disputed" column. The Gemaryahu bulla needs no such caution.
The Lachish ostraca, letters on potsherds found in the Lachish gate in the 1930s, date to the final campaign. Letter 4 reports that the writer is watching for the fire signals of Lachish "because we cannot see Azekah." Jeremiah 34:7 names Lachish and Azekah as the last fortified cities standing besides Jerusalem. Letter 3 mentions an army commander, Konyahu son of Elnatan, going down to Egypt, and a warning passed on from an unnamed "prophet." Hugh Nibley's "The Lachish Letters: Documents from Lehi's Day" (Ensign, 1981) read them as a window onto the world Lehi fled: officials hunting a fugitive prophet, names overwhelmingly ending in -yahu. His parallels are suggestive rather than probative, but they set Lehi in a real military crisis.
Here the Book of Mormon makes a claim the Bible appears to contradict. Helaman 8:21 says that "the sons of Zedekiah" were slain "save it were Mulek," and Mosiah 25:2 traces the people of Zarahemla to him. Jeremiah 39:6 reads: "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." 2 Kings 25:7 and Jeremiah 52:10 say the same.
Three textual observations are fair. First, the Hebrew of 39:6 applies "all" (kol) to the nobles, not to the sons. That proves nothing (the plain sense is a dynastic extermination), but the text does not explicitly close the door. Second, the narrative later mentions "the king's daughters" alive at Mizpah (41:10; 43:6), so the royal household was not entirely wiped out. Third, 39:4–13 is itself part of the Masoretic plus, though 52:10 preserves the same report.
Then there is Jeremiah 38:6, where Jeremiah is lowered into "the dungeon of Malchiah the son of Hammelech." The Hebrew is Malkiyahu ben-hammelek, "Malkiyahu, son of the king." Robert F. Smith and Benjamin Urrutia (in Reexploring the Book of Mormon, 1992) proposed that Mulek is a shortened form of a name built on mlk, such as Malkiyahu, on the pattern of Baruch from Berekhyahu. Jeffrey R. Chadwick, in "Has the Seal of Mulek Been Found?" (Journal of Book of Mormon Studies, 2003), went further. He discussed a stamp seal inscribed "Belonging to Malkiyahu, son of the king," argued from biblical usage that ben-hammelek means a biological son of a king, and proposed that this Malkiyahu was Zedekiah's son, perhaps a teenager sent to Egypt before the fall.
The limits need to be stated as plainly as the possibility. The seal is unprovenanced: it surfaced in a dealer's catalog in 1991 and is now in a private collection. Its first editor, André Lemaire, questioned its authenticity, though later corpora accepted it. The title ben-hammelek also appears for Jerahmeel in 36:26, under Jehoiakim, and the verse does not say which king's son Malchiah was. Zedekiah was thirty-two when the city fell (2 Kings 24:18), so a son of his would have been young to own the cistern of 38:6. Chadwick confronts that problem, but it remains one. The most that can responsibly be said is that the Hebrew Bible contains a royal Malkiyahu in Zedekiah's court, that the name could plausibly yield "Mulek," and that 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.
"In the dungeon there was no water, but mire" (38:6), and Ebed-melech, a Cushite in royal service, pads the ropes with "old cast clouts and old rotten rags" so they will not cut into the prophet's armpits (38:11–12). The one person here who treats Jeremiah with ordinary tenderness is a foreigner, and his life is promised "because thou hast put thy trust in me" (39:18).
David Rolph Seely and Jo Ann H. Seely ("Lehi and Jeremiah: Prophets, Priests, and Patriarchs," 2004) set the two contemporaries side by side, both bearing messages of destruction and restoration, both persecuted. Jeremiah 32 adds a contrast. Lehi is commanded to leave "the land of his inheritance, and his gold, and his silver, and his precious things" (1 Nephi 2:4). Jeremiah is commanded to buy land, under the right of redemption (32:7–8), at the very moment the land is being lost. Both are prophetic signs pointing in opposite directions: Lehi's says the future lies elsewhere; Jeremiah's says that "houses and fields and vineyards shall be possessed again in this land" (32:15). The Restoration reader inherits both: a scattered branch carried across the sea and a promised regathering to the land. Jeremiah's deed sealed in a jar and the plates Moroni sealed in the earth are, structurally, the same gesture.
The phrase "new covenant" (berit ḥadashah) occurs only once in the Hebrew Bible, at 31:31. In context it is made "with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah." It contrasts with the Sinai covenant "which my covenant they brake" (31:32), and it is internal rather than external: "I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts" (31:33). It does not abolish Torah; it relocates it. Hebrews 8 reads the passage as announcing the obsolescence of the first covenant ("he hath made the first old," Hebrews 8:13), and that reading became a pillar of Christian supersessionism. Jewish interpreters rightly answer that Jeremiah addresses the literal houses of Israel and Judah, and that the next verses (31:35–37) say God will no more cast off Israel than the sun and moon will stop.
Latter-day Saint theology has its own "new and everlasting covenant" (D&C 22:1; 66:2; 132:6), echoing Jeremiah 32:40, "I will make an everlasting covenant with them." In D&C 84:57 the Lord rebukes the early Saints until they "remember the new covenant, even the Book of Mormon." That 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. The retired sour-grapes proverb (31:29–30) belongs to the same reorientation toward each person's own heart and accountability.
The Hebrew book called ʼEkhah ("How!"), from its first word in 1:1, is anonymous. The attribution to Jeremiah is ancient. The Septuagint adds a prologue in which Jeremiah sits weeping, and the Babylonian Talmud (Bava Batra 15a) says Jeremiah wrote his own book, Kings, and Lamentations. Most modern scholars doubt it. Liz Boase summarizes the reasons: the acrostics follow different alphabetical orders (chapter 1 has ʻayin before pe, chapters 2–4 reverse them), 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 text itself contains a small clue that cuts both ways. Lamentations 3:53–55 says, "They have cut off my life in the dungeon [bor], and cast a stone upon me. Waters flowed over mine head… I called upon thy name, O LORD, out of the low dungeon." Jeremiah 38:6 uses the same word, bor, but says pointedly that "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.
Chapter 3 is a triple acrostic: three lines for each letter, 66 verses. At its center stands the turn the Church lesson quotes: "It is of the LORD's mercies that we are not consumed… they are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness" (3:22–23); "he doth not afflict willingly" (3:33). But the poem does not end there. Within a few verses the community says, "We have transgressed and have rebelled: thou hast not pardoned" (3:42), and "Thou hast covered thyself with a cloud, that our prayer should not pass through" (3:44), and the chapter closes by asking for vengeance (3:64–66). The confidence of 3:22–33 is one voice in an argument, not its verdict, and Jewish liturgy knows it. When Lamentations is read on Tisha B'Av, the congregation repeats 5:21, "Turn thou us unto thee, O LORD," after the final verse, so the reading does not end on the bleak 5:22.
For Latter-day Saints, Lamentations is the Bible's fullest voice from inside the catastrophe that Lehi's family escaped. Lehi knew it only by vision: "I have seen a vision, in which I know that Jerusalem is destroyed" (2 Nephi 1:4). Anonymous poets and an unresolved theology do not diminish that; they make the book truer to grief. Lamentations lets "great is thy faithfulness" and "thou hast not pardoned" stand within twenty verses of each other, and Jeremiah 31 promises that mourning will turn to joy (31:13). Neither book claims the turn has already happened.