Panel essay · Jeremiah 31–39; Lamentations · October 26–November 1, 2026 · Six outlooks · the Parry method
Written by an AI persona applying Donald W. Parry's six-outlooks framework. Professor Parry did not write, review, or endorse this essay, and no words are attributed to him that are not cited to a published source.
Thus saith the LORD; 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. (Jeremiah 31:15–17)
Donald W. Parry, a professor of Hebrew Bible at Brigham Young University, wrote a short chapter called "Ways to Read Isaiah: Six Outlooks" for the Religious Studies Center volume Search Diligently the Words of Isaiah. He was writing about Isaiah, but the six lenses he lays out travel well to any prophet: read for the historical setting (the near view); read for prophecy (the distant view); watch for dual or multiple fulfillment; liken the text to yourself; read for personal instruction or revelation, even when what comes has little to do with the passage; and read to understand doctrine, the outlook Parry presses hardest. This essay applies his framework. It does not speak for him.
Most passages in this week's block reward one or two of these lenses. 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 about Herod's slaughter of the children of Bethlehem (Matthew 2:16–18), so the New Testament itself models a second fulfillment. And the following verses, which Matthew does not quote, turn the lament into a promise, giving the doctrinal outlook something solid to hold. The new covenant of 31:31–34 is the more famous text this week. But Rachel's three verses are short enough to read slowly six times, and they hold the whole arc of the block, from weeping to "I will turn their mourning into joy" (31:13), in a small space.
Start where Jeremiah's hearers stood. Ramah was a town of Benjamin (Joshua 18:25), just north of Jerusalem. It turns up later in the book with grim specificity: after the city fell, Nebuzar-adan released Jeremiah "from Ramah, when he had taken him being bound in chains among all that were carried away captive of Jerusalem and Judah" (Jeremiah 40:1). Ramah, in other words, served as a collection point on the road to Babylon. A voice heard in Ramah is a voice heard along the deportation route.
Why Rachel? She was the mother of Joseph and Benjamin. Through Joseph's sons Ephraim and Manasseh she stands as the ancestress of the northern tribes, which Assyria had carried off more than a century before Jerusalem fell. The verses that follow immediately shift to "Ephraim bemoaning himself" (31:18–20), so the poem has the lost north squarely in view. Through Benjamin she is also the mother of the tribe in whose territory Ramah, and Jeremiah's own Anathoth (1:1; 32:8), lay. Her children are the exiles of both catastrophes.
The geography of her grave matters too. Genesis says Rachel died in childbirth and "was buried in the way to Ephrath, which is Bethlehem" (Genesis 35:19). 1 Samuel 10:2 instead places "Rachel's sepulchre in the border of Benjamin at Zelzah." The two traditions sit uneasily together, but on either reading Rachel is the matriarch buried by the road, not in the family tomb at Machpelah. Jeremiah imagines her as the one ancestor close enough to hear her descendants pass.
The poem also draws on her story. Rachel's first recorded words are "Give me children, or else I die" (Genesis 30:1). In Hebrew the "or else" is built on ʼayin, "there is not," and verse 15 ends on the same particle: ki ʼênennû, "because they were not." (The Hebrew is grammatically singular, literally "because he is not," and the KJV smooths it to a plural.) And "refused to be comforted" (mēʼănāh lĕhinnāḥēm) echoes Jacob mourning Joseph, Rachel's son, who "refused to be comforted" (Genesis 37:35, vayĕmāʼēn lĕhitnaḥēm). So the mother who once begged for children now weeps because they are gone, using words that recall the father who mourned her firstborn. An audience living through the deportations would have heard a family story become a national one.
In its own setting, then, the passage is an exile oracle. A promise (31:16–17) answers a lament (31:15), and both sit inside the "Book of Consolation" of chapters 30–33.
The prophecy in verses 16–17 reaches past the moment of its speaking: "they shall come again from the land of the enemy… thy children shall come again to their own border." The return under Cyrus fulfilled this in part for Judah and Benjamin. For the northern tribes, the "Ephraim" of verses 18–20, no comparable return happened in antiquity. The chapter itself pushes the horizon outward. God will gather Israel "from the north country… from the coasts of the earth" (31:8), and Israel will cease to be a nation only if the sun, moon, and stars do (31:35–36). The chapter heading in the Latter-day Saint edition reads the chapter as a last-days gathering. That heading is a modern editorial summary, not scripture, but it shows how the distant view naturally reads this text: the return is not finished.
A careful reader should hold both horizons together. The near fulfillment proves the promise was not empty, and the unfinished part keeps it open.
This is where the passage is most famous. After Herod "slew all the children that were in Bethlehem, and in all the coasts thereof, from two years old and under," Matthew writes: "Then was fulfilled that which was spoken by Jeremy the prophet" (Matthew 2:16–17), and he 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: the Genesis tradition puts Rachel's tomb on the way to Bethlehem, so the mother buried near Bethlehem weeps again when Bethlehem's sons are killed. Grief for children, a tyrant, a threatened line, and a survivor who will be carried into and out of a foreign land (Egypt in Matthew 2:13–15, Babylon in Jeremiah) form a shape that recurs. Parry's third outlook names this directly: a prophecy can be fulfilled more than once.
One small detail in Matthew is worth noticing. For several of his other formula quotations Matthew writes that something happened "that it might be fulfilled" (for example 1:22; 2:15; 2:23). Here, and again at 27:9 (also attributed to Jeremiah), he writes only "then was fulfilled." Some readers take the change as deliberate: Matthew does not say Herod's murders happened in order to fulfill scripture. The text supports at least that much restraint.
Matthew's choice also brings verses 16–17 along with it, even though he does not quote them. A reader who knows Jeremiah knows that the voice in Ramah is answered: "they shall come again from the land of the enemy." Placed in Matthew's setting, that sentence takes on a meaning Jeremiah's first hearers could not have given it.
Parry's fourth outlook is the one Latter-day Saints know by Nephi's word: "I did liken all scriptures unto us, that it might be for our profit and learning" (1 Nephi 19:23). Ancient Judaism had its own version. The Dead Sea Scrolls community wrote pesharim, commentaries that read a prophet line by line and announce that it refers to the community's own time. Krister Stendahl's The School of St. Matthew and Its Use of the Old Testament (1954) argued that Matthew's formula quotations, including this one, work much like the pesher mode of the Habakkuk commentary from Qumran. Matthew 2:18 is likening done by an apostle.
Rabbinic tradition likened the verse as well, and boldly. Rashi, commenting on Genesis 48:7, explains why Jacob buried Rachel by the roadside rather than carrying her to Bethlehem or Hebron: so that when Nebuzaradan led her descendants into exile along that road, she could come out of her grave and weep for mercy on them, and be answered with Jeremiah 31:16–17. Eikhah (Lamentations) Rabbah, in its prologue (Petichta 24), goes further. Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Moses each plead for exiled Israel and are not answered. Then Rachel speaks of how she did not shame her sister Leah on the wedding night, and asks why God, the merciful King, should be jealous of idols that have no substance. God's mercy is stirred: for her sake, he says, he will restore Israel. Jewish readers have kept that likening alive for centuries in pilgrimage and prayer at Rachel's tomb.
For a reader this week, likening means asking who in your own world is weeping in Ramah: parents of children who have walked away from the faith or the family, families scattered by migration or war, communities that have lost a generation. The text does not offer to explain the grief. It names it, at full volume, as something God hears.
Parry's fifth outlook works differently from the others. A reader comes to scripture with a need, and a phrase answers it, sometimes in ways that have little to do with the passage's original setting. The words are not being explained. They are being used as a channel for instruction or guidance.
Jeremiah 31:16 is the kind of line that does this: "thy work shall be rewarded." In context, Rachel's "work" (pĕʻullāh) is her mothering, the labor and the grief that come with it. A reader worn out by caring for a struggling child, a dying parent, or a calling that seems to produce nothing might hear that sentence as addressed to them, and might take from it a specific prompting about what to do next, or not to do. Nothing in Jeremiah's historical setting predicts that. The fifth outlook does not need it to. It asks the reader to pray with the text, and it trusts that the Spirit is not limited to the passage's original reference. The only discipline required is honesty: do not mistake a personal impression for the passage's plain meaning, and do not impose your impression on someone else as exegesis.
Parry stresses the doctrinal outlook most, and Jeremiah 31:15–17 teaches more doctrine than its size suggests.
First, notice what God does not do. He does not rebuke Rachel's refusal to be comforted. Her grief is recorded as a "voice… heard," and the next line begins "Thus saith the LORD," as a reply. When God tells her to "refrain thy voice from weeping," he gives a reason: "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. The contrast with Lamentations 1, read this same week, is deliberate and painful. There the refrain is that Zion "hath none to comfort her" (Lamentations 1:2, 9, 17, 21). Here, a few verses earlier, God says "I will… comfort them" (Jeremiah 31:13). Lamentations records the absence of comfort honestly, and Jeremiah 31 does not erase that record. It answers it.
Second, the passage teaches that God's own heart is moved. Verse 20, in the same poem, has God say of Ephraim: "my bowels are troubled for him; I will surely have mercy upon him." The rabbis took this further. In the midrash on Lamentations 1:2, Israel weeps and makes the Holy One weep with her (Eikhah Rabbah 1:23). Latter-day Saint readers will think of Enoch's God who weeps (Moses 7:28–29). The doctrine is not that God is helpless, but that his compassion is real and involved.
Third, there is the doctrine of restoration. "They shall come again from the land of the enemy" applies first to geography: Babylon is the enemy's land. Yet Matthew placed these words beside a massacre of infants, and once they stand there a further reading is hard to avoid. Paul calls death "the last enemy" (1 Corinthians 15:26). Read in Christ's light, the children of Bethlehem "come again from the land of the enemy" through resurrection. Latter-day Saint doctrine adds that "all children who die before they arrive at the years of accountability are saved in the celestial kingdom of heaven" (Doctrine and Covenants 137:10, a vision Joseph Smith received in the Kirtland Temple in January 1836). That is not what Jeremiah meant at the fall of Jerusalem. It is what the doctrinal outlook, reading across the whole canon, is entitled to say the passage now points toward. Keep the layers distinct and the reading stays honest.
Fourth, within a few verses of Rachel come "every one shall die for his own iniquity" (31:29–30) and the new covenant (31:31–34). The poem moves from a mother's grief, to a son's repentance (31:18–19, "turn thou me, and I shall be turned"), to a covenant written on the heart. Placement is part of meaning. The doctrine of the new covenant is introduced by a weeping mother and a repenting child, not by a legal formula.
Read only historically, Jeremiah 31:15 is an exile poem about a dead matriarch. Read only prophetically, it becomes a proof text for Bethlehem and nothing more. Read only devotionally, it becomes a mood. Parry's framework is useful because it does not make a reader choose. The Babylonian deportees at Ramah, the mothers of Bethlehem, the readers who have prayed at Rachel's tomb, and a reader this week with a lost child of their own all hear the same three verses. They hear the same order: a lament first, then God's answer, and only after both, the covenant.