≈30 min · introductory episode · October 26–November 1, 2026
A conversation introducing the week. All voices — hosts and guest — are AI-written study personas, not real people.
Weekly introductory episode — Come Follow Me, October 26–November 1, 2026: Jeremiah 31–33; 36–39; Lamentations 1; 3
ELI: Nathan, picture a man in jail. His city is surrounded. The enemy has built ramps against the walls. And his cousin walks in and says, hey, want to buy some farmland?
NATHAN: In the town the enemy already controls.
ELI: In the town the enemy already controls. And he says yes. He weighs out the silver, signs the deed, calls witnesses, and has it sealed in a clay jar.
NATHAN: Jeremiah 32. Seventeen shekels of silver.
ELI: And I thought, I know people who've done that. Not with land. With a marriage in a cold season. With a kid who isn't speaking to them. They keep investing in a future that looks like a siege.
NATHAN: Welcome in. This is the introduction to the week of October 26th through November 1st: Jeremiah 31 through 33, then 36 through 39, then Lamentations 1 and 3. The lesson is called "I Will Turn Their Mourning into Joy." And to be clear up front, this episode is not one of the five study sessions. It's the front door. Context, then content, then real time on the controversies.
ELI: And we have a guest, because this block is a place Latter-day Saints have been before. It's Lehi's Jerusalem. Same king, same years, same prophet in prison. So our guest is the panel's LDS scholar, who wrote this week's essay, "A Scroll in the Fire, a Deed in a Jar." Welcome.
THE LDS SCHOLAR: Thanks for having me. And Eli, you've found the image I built the essay around. Two documents frame this week. In chapter 36 a king feeds a prophetic scroll into a fire until it's gone. In chapter 32 a prophet seals a deed in a jar "that they may continue many days." One document is destroyed so it can't speak. The other is buried so it can speak later.
NATHAN: Which is basically how we know anything about Jeremiah's Jerusalem.
THE LDS SCHOLAR: Exactly. Much of the evidence from these years survived because it was burned or buried. And much of what we'd love to know went into the fire.
ELI: Nathan, put us on the map.
NATHAN: Quick dates. 605 BC, the fourth year of King Jehoiakim: Babylon wins at Carchemish, and Jeremiah dictates his first scroll. That's chapter 36. In 597 Babylon takes Jerusalem the first time. The Babylonian Chronicle records it, including the new king Nebuchadnezzar installed.
ELI: Zedekiah.
NATHAN: Zedekiah. Who rebels. Chapter 39, verse 1: the siege begins in his ninth year. Verse 2: the wall is breached in his eleventh, about eighteen months later. That's 587 or 586, depending how you line up the calendars.
THE LDS SCHOLAR: And here the Book of Mormon walks in. Nephi dates his father's call to "the commencement of the first year of the reign of Zedekiah." First Nephi 1, verse 4. First Nephi 5, verse 13 says the brass plates held "many prophecies which have been spoken by the mouth of Jeremiah." And in 1 Nephi 7, verse 14, Nephi tells his brothers, "Jeremiah have they cast into prison."
ELI: That's current events.
THE LDS SCHOLAR: It is. The panel's doctrinal connector puts it well: Jeremiah is the prophet who stayed behind while the founding family of a second scripture went into the wilderness.
NATHAN: One more piece of the map. In the 1930s, excavators at Lachish found letters on pottery shards from that final campaign. In Letter 4, an officer says he's watching for the fire signals of Lachish, "because we cannot see Azekah."
ELI: Meaning Azekah has fallen.
NATHAN: The signal went dark. And Jeremiah 34, verse 7, right next to our block, names Lachish and Azekah as the last fortified cities standing besides Jerusalem.
THE LDS SCHOLAR: Hugh Nibley's 1981 Ensign piece, "The Lachish Letters: Documents from Lehi's Day," read them as a window on the world Lehi fled. Suggestive, not proof. But it puts Lehi in a real military crisis.
ELI: And the panel's rabbi adds a different map. For a Jewish reader, this block is a calendar. The siege, the breach of the walls, and the burning of the Temple are still fast days. On the Ninth of Av, people sit on the floor in the half-dark and chant Lamentations. His line: a Christian reader meets Jeremiah 39 as history. "We meet it as the days we do not eat."
NATHAN: Okay. Content. Chapter 31.
ELI: The doom prophet's happy chapters.
NATHAN: Chapters 30 through 33 are called the Book of Consolation. Chapter 31, verse 3: "I have loved thee with an everlasting love." Verse 9: "They shall come with weeping, and with supplications will I lead them." Verse 13, the lesson title: "I will turn their mourning into joy, and will comfort them."
ELI: And then verse 15. "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."
NATHAN: Which most people know from Matthew 2.
ELI: Herod and the children of Bethlehem. But the panel's six-outlooks writer and the rabbi both make a point that changed how I read it. Matthew quotes verse 15 and stops. Jeremiah doesn't. Verse 16: "Refrain thy voice from weeping, and thine eyes from tears: for thy work shall be rewarded." Verse 17: "there is hope in thine end."
NATHAN: And the six-outlooks essay notices that in chapter 40, Jeremiah is released "from Ramah," where he'd been bound in chains among the captives. Ramah was a collection point on the road to Babylon.
ELI: And the rabbi brings in the midrash on Lamentations. Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Moses each plead with God over the exile. None is answered. Then Rachel speaks. She reminds God she taught Leah the secret signs so her sister wouldn't be shamed on the wedding night. So why should God be jealous of idols that are nothing? And God's mercy is stirred. For your sake, Rachel, I'll restore them.
THE LDS SCHOLAR: The patriarchs argue merit. Rachel argues that God should be at least as generous as she was. And she wins.
ELI: The rabbi's summary: in Jewish memory Rachel isn't inconsolable grief. "She is the mother whose weeping works."
NATHAN: Then right after Rachel, a father. Verse 20: "Is Ephraim my dear son? is he a pleasant child? ... therefore my bowels are troubled for him."
ELI: The practical disciple's line: "A parent can hold a line and still lie awake."
NATHAN: Then two passages we'll come back to. Verses 29 and 30 retire a proverb: "The fathers have eaten a sour grape, and the children's teeth are set on edge." Now "every one shall die for his own iniquity." And verses 31 through 34, the new covenant. "I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts." "They shall all know me."
THE LDS SCHOLAR: Worth saying now: "new covenant" occurs exactly once in the Hebrew Bible. Right here, 31, verse 31. Hebrews 8 quotes all of it. We'll get to what that's done in history.
ELI: Chapter 32. My jail cell. Jeremiah is "shut up in the court of the prison," and his cousin Hanameel says, buy my field at Anathoth, "for the right of redemption is thine."
NATHAN: A real legal category. Leviticus 25, verse 25: the kinsman's duty to buy back family land. The panel's academic scholar loves the detail here. Silver is weighed, not counted, because there's no coinage yet. And the deed is made twice: "that which was sealed according to the law and custom, and that which was open." One copy sealed against tampering, one left readable.
THE LDS SCHOLAR: Then verse 14: "put them in an earthen vessel, that they may continue many days." Which is how the Dead Sea Scrolls survived. And verse 15 is the point: "Houses and fields and vineyards shall be possessed again in this land."
ELI: Give us the Lehi angle.
THE LDS SCHOLAR: This builds on David and Jo Ann Seely's work setting Lehi and Jeremiah side by side. Lehi is commanded to leave "the land of his inheritance, and his gold, and his silver, and his precious things." First Nephi 2, verse 4. At almost the same moment, Jeremiah is commanded to buy land. Both are prophetic signs, pointing opposite directions. Lehi's says the future lies elsewhere; Jeremiah's, right here. And a deed sealed in a jar and plates sealed in the earth are, structurally, the same gesture.
ELI: What I love is that Jeremiah doesn't pretend he understands. Verse 17: "Ah Lord GOD! ... there is nothing too hard for thee." And by verses 24 and 25 it sounds like, the siege mounds are at the walls, and you told me to buy a field?
NATHAN: And God hands his words back. Verse 27: "is there any thing too hard for me?"
ELI: The practical disciple says faith here "is not a feeling." It's paperwork for a future you may not see. His question for the week: what am I refusing to invest in because the present looks like a siege?
NATHAN: Chapter 33 then gives us verse 3, "Call unto me, and I will answer thee," and the "Branch of righteousness" in verse 15, and a promise that David will never lack a man on the throne, verses 17 through 22. Flag that. It's our first controversy.
ELI: And the rabbi pointed me to verses 10 and 11. "The voice of joy, and the voice of gladness, the voice of the bridegroom, and the voice of the bride." Earlier, Jeremiah used those four voices as a curse. Here he reverses it. And today the seventh of the Seven Blessings at every Jewish wedding quotes this verse.
THE LDS SCHOLAR: The city that sat "as a widow" supplies the words for every Jewish wedding.
ELI: The fasts aren't cancelled. The weddings happen anyway.
NATHAN: Chapter 36. The burned scroll. The academic scholar calls it, more or less, a book watching itself being made. Jeremiah is barred from the temple, so he dictates and Baruch writes. Verse 18: "He pronounced all these words unto me with his mouth, and I wrote them with ink in the book." Baruch reads it from the chamber of Gemariah, son of Shaphan. The officials take it to the king. It's winter. As Jehudi reads "three or four leaves," the king cuts them off with a penknife and burns them, "until all the roll was consumed."
ELI: The practical disciple: he does it slowly. That's contempt, not panic.
NATHAN: And verse 24: "they were not afraid, nor rent their garments." Jehoiakim's father Josiah tore his clothes when a scroll was read to him. The son burns one.
THE LDS SCHOLAR: Then verse 32, the one that matters most to me. Jeremiah dictates it all again, "and there were added besides unto them many like words." By the book's own account, Jeremiah was a growing text from the start.
NATHAN: And notice the people. Three officials, Elnathan, Delaiah, and Gemariah, beg the king not to burn it. "But he would not hear them." Their objection is still recorded. Sometimes the faithful act in a meeting is the one that gets overruled.
ELI: And the rabbi has a reading I didn't see coming. The Talmud says the scroll the king burned was Lamentations. They read him "How doth the city sit solitary," and he says, I am king. Four verses, four "leaves." And Rashi says the "many like words" added to the second scroll was Lamentations 3, where every letter is tripled.
THE LDS SCHOLAR: So in the tradition, Lamentations 1 is what a king burned, and Lamentations 3 is what the prophet wrote back, three times over.
ELI: The rabbi is clear that's not history. It's saying "the response to a burned word is more word."
NATHAN: Then 37 and 38. Zedekiah. And the lesson asks: what's the evidence he believed Jeremiah, and what's the evidence he didn't?
ELI: The practical disciple makes the case he's no villain. He asks secretly, 37, verse 17: "Is there any word from the LORD?" He orders Jeremiah a daily loaf of bread. And then he hands him to the princes. 38, verse 5: "Behold, he is in your hand: for the king is not he that can do any thing against you." And verse 19 gives his real reason for not surrendering. "I am afraid of the Jews that are fallen to the Chaldeans, lest they deliver me into their hand, and they mock me."
NATHAN: (quietly) The king of Judah is afraid of being laughed at.
ELI: And Jeremiah's answer is so short. "They shall not deliver thee. Obey, I beseech thee." Zedekiah's problem was never information. That's my Thursday-night question, honestly. Where am I asking for more revelation about something I've already been told?
THE LDS SCHOLAR: And the lesson asks us to set him next to Lehi. Same message. One trusted the prophet privately and disobeyed publicly. The other obeyed and left his gold behind.
NATHAN: Then the cistern. 38, verse 6: they put Jeremiah into "the dungeon of Malchiah the son of Hammelech," and "there was no water, but mire: so Jeremiah sunk in the mire."
THE LDS SCHOLAR: Remember that name. Malchiah son of Hammelech. It's coming back.
ELI: And then Ebed-melech, the Ethiopian. A Cushite eunuch, an outsider several times over. He goes to the king in a public gate and says out loud, "these men have done evil," about the most powerful princes in the city. Then, before thirty men pull, he gets "old cast clouts and old rotten rags," lowers them down, and tells Jeremiah to put them "under thine armholes under the cords." A starving man hauled out of mud by ropes would be torn apart. Ebed-melech thought about where the ropes would cut.
THE LDS SCHOLAR: The one person in this story who treats Jeremiah with ordinary tenderness is a foreigner.
ELI: The practical disciple turns it into ministering. The rag part is what nobody thanks you for: the frozen meal with reheating instructions taped on, because the widower has never used the oven. And God promises Ebed-melech his life, 39, verse 18, "because thou hast put thy trust in me." The verse before says he won't be given to the men "of whom thou art afraid." He was afraid too.
NATHAN: So was Zedekiah. One of them acted anyway. And then chapter 39. The wall falls. Zedekiah runs by night, is caught in the plains of Jericho, and brought to Riblah. Verse 6: "the king of Babylon slew the sons of Zedekiah in Riblah before his eyes." Verse 7: "Moreover he put out Zedekiah's eyes."
ELI: The last thing he saw was what his fear cost. Which takes us to Lamentations. Chapter 1. "How doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people! how is she become as a widow!" And the refrain, like a bell: "she hath none to comfort her."
NATHAN: The book's Hebrew name is its first word, Eikhah. "How." Chapters 1 through 4 are alphabetic acrostics, each verse starting with the next letter. Chapter 3 is a triple acrostic, three lines per letter, 66 verses. Grief told from A to Z.
ELI: And verse 12. "Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by? behold, and see if there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow."
NATHAN: The practical disciple calls that a ministering assignment.
ELI: The charge isn't that nobody fixed it. It's that people passed by. The casserole comes on day three. By week six, when the widow is actually alone, there's nothing. Put a reminder on your calendar for the third month.
NATHAN: Then chapter 3. "I am the man that hath seen affliction by the rod of his wrath." God as a bear, a lion, an archer. Verse 8: "when I cry and shout, he shutteth out my prayer."
THE LDS SCHOLAR: And then the turn. Verse 21: "This I recall to my mind, therefore have I hope." Verses 22 and 23: "It is of the LORD's mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness." Verse 33: "he doth not afflict willingly nor grieve the children of men."
ELI: And the rabbi says observant Jews end the morning prayer Modeh ani with "great is thy faithfulness," before they even get out of bed. His line: "We take the brightest line from the darkest book and say it with our eyes barely open."
NATHAN: Hold that. Because the chapter doesn't end at verse 33.
ELI: Which is our cue. Controversies. Nathan, you've been itching.
NATHAN: (laughing) I have. Here's the fact most readers of an English Bible never learn. There is more than one book of Jeremiah. The Hebrew text behind the King James, the Masoretic Text, is the long one. The Greek Septuagint is roughly one-seventh shorter, and arranges things differently. Our chapter 31 is chapter 38 in the Greek.
ELI: Couldn't the Greek translator just have abridged?
NATHAN: That was the guess for a long time. The Dead Sea Scrolls ended it. Two Hebrew fragments from Qumran Cave 4, called 4QJer-b and 4QJer-d, preserve a Hebrew text like the shorter Greek. So a short Hebrew Jeremiah really existed.
THE LDS SCHOLAR: And Emanuel Tov, the leading authority on the text of the Hebrew Bible, argued that the short form is an earlier edition and the Masoretic is a later, deliberately expanded one. Qumran kept copies of both. And this week holds the most famous expansion: chapter 33, verses 14 through 26. The promise that "David shall never want a man to sit upon the throne," and that the Levites won't lack a priest, as sure as God's covenant with day and night. It's absent from the Greek, and Johanna Erzberger argues it was added, not dropped. Also missing from the Greek: 39, verses 4 through 13, the flight and Riblah, though the Greek keeps that story in chapter 52.
NATHAN: And the academic scholar notices a telling shift. The passage reworks the "Branch" oracle from chapter 23. There the Branch "shall reign as king." In 33, verse 15, he only "shall execute judgment and righteousness," and the royal promise now runs alongside an equal one for the priests. That fits a later time, when the monarchy was gone and the priesthood survived.
ELI: Steel-man the faithful side.
THE LDS SCHOLAR: The honest questioner lays out the options well. One: inspired expansion is exactly what 36, verse 32 describes. Jeremiah, Baruch, or later disciples added "many like words," and the longer edition is no less scripture for being later. Two: Latter-day Saints accept the Bible "as far as it is translated correctly," and the Book of Mormon says plainly that a Bible doesn't contain all of God's words. The critical reading is simpler. Some of what the King James presents as Jeremiah's words were composed by scribes generations later.
NATHAN: And the questioner adds an edge. Verse 17 says David will never lack a man on the throne. After Zedekiah, no son of David ever sat on the throne of an independent Judah again. Christians read the Branch as Jesus. Jewish tradition reads it as still pending. Whether that's fulfillment or reinterpretation, the questioner says, is the reader's call.
ELI: Now the question I really want to ask our guest. What did Lehi have?
THE LDS SCHOLAR: This is where it gets interesting. First Nephi 5, verse 13 puts "many prophecies" of Jeremiah on the brass plates, and that fits chapter 36, which has a written collection in 605, before Lehi left. But it means Lehi carried an early stage of a book that kept growing after him. The plates couldn't have held chapters 37 through 39, and what they did hold, we don't know. My bottom line: A people who believe in an open canon shouldn't be unsettled by 36, verse 32. The Bible itself says its prophetic books were added to.
ELI: Okay. Bullae. Define it first.
NATHAN: A bulla is a lump of clay used to seal a papyrus document, stamped with the owner's seal. And here's the irony. When Babylon burned Jerusalem, the fire destroyed the papyrus and baked the clay hard. The seals outlived the documents.
THE LDS SCHOLAR: And the case needing no caution is Gemaryahu. In 1982, Yigal Shiloh's excavation in the City of David found a room with 51 bullae in the destruction layer. One reads "Belonging to Gemaryahu son of Shaphan." Controlled dig, datable layer, and very plausibly the Gemariah who begged the king not to burn the scroll.
ELI: The guy who lost the argument in the meeting.
THE LDS SCHOLAR: His seal survived the fire the scroll didn't. Now the famous one: "Berekhyahu son of Neriyahu the scribe." That's Baruch, full name. But it came from the antiquities market, no findspot. In 2014 Yuval Goren and Eran Arie published a lab study concluding the two known Berekhyahu bullae are modern forgeries. In 2016 Peter van der Veen, Robert Deutsch, and Gabriel Barkay published a rejoinder defending them.
ELI: So which is it?
THE LDS SCHOLAR: Disputed. Nothing should rest on it. The academic scholar has a rule I'd adopt: an artifact with no findspot that confirms a biblical name exactly deserves more suspicion, not less.
NATHAN: Carry that rule into the next one.
ELI: Mulek.
THE LDS SCHOLAR: The one Latter-day Saints are most likely to meet online. Helaman 8, verse 21: "Will ye say that the sons of Zedekiah were not slain, all except it were Mulek?" Mosiah 25, verse 2 traces the people of Zarahemla to him. And Jeremiah 39, verse 6 says the king of Babylon "slew the sons of Zedekiah." Critics call it a contradiction. It's a fair question.
ELI: What can you honestly say?
THE LDS SCHOLAR: Three fair textual points. First, in the Hebrew of 39, verse 6, "all" goes with the nobles, not the sons. "Slew the sons," then "slew all the nobles." That proves nothing. The plain sense is a dynastic wipeout. But the text doesn't explicitly close the door. Second, "the king's daughters" turn up alive later at Mizpah, so the household wasn't entirely wiped out. Third, 39, verses 4 through 13 is part of the Masoretic plus, though chapter 52 has the same report. Then the cistern. "Malchiah the son of Hammelech" is, in Hebrew, Malkiyahu ben hammelek. "Malkiyahu, son of the king." Robert F. Smith and Benjamin Urrutia proposed that Mulek could be a short form of a name like that, the way Baruch is short for Berekhyahu. And Jeffrey Chadwick, in "Has the Seal of Mulek Been Found?" in 2003, discussed a stamp seal reading "Belonging to Malkiyahu, son of the king," argued the phrase means a literal royal son, and proposed this was Zedekiah's son, perhaps a teenager who got out before the fall.
ELI: Now the other side, same energy.
THE LDS SCHOLAR: Gladly. The seal is unprovenanced. It surfaced in a dealer's catalog in 1991. Its first editor, André Lemaire, questioned its authenticity, though later corpora accepted it. Same problem as the Baruch bulla. "Son of the king" is also used for Jerahmeel in chapter 36, under Jehoiakim, and 38, verse 6 doesn't say which king. Zedekiah was thirty-two when the city fell, young to have a son who owns a cistern. Chadwick confronts that, but it remains a problem. And Mulek and Malkiyahu are related forms, not the same name. So the most I can responsibly say: the Bible has a royal Malkiyahu in Zedekiah's court, the name could plausibly yield "Mulek," and no biblical text explicitly rules out a surviving son. That's a real intersection, not a demonstration, and Chadwick himself framed it as a possibility. Nothing outside the Book of Mormon says Mulek escaped.
ELI: (laughing) That's more careful than anything I've seen in a comment thread.
THE LDS SCHOLAR: That's the goal. Both sides, at full strength.
ELI: The new covenant. Hebrews 8 quotes Jeremiah 31 and then says, verse 13: "In that he saith, A new covenant, he hath made the first old." For much of Christian history that line supported supersessionism. The Church replaced Israel; God's covenant with the Jews had lapsed. The rabbi says it was used "to treat the Jews as a fossil."
NATHAN: And the Jewish answer comes straight from Jeremiah.
ELI: Three points, and the rabbi makes them sharply. Who's it with? "The house of Israel, and the house of Judah." Not a new people. What's written on the heart? "My law." Torati. My Torah. The same one, inside instead of outside. The medieval commentator Radak reads it that way: the newness is that this time it will be kept. And third, the one the rabbi says almost no Christian study group notices. Hebrews stops at verse 34. Jeremiah keeps going. Verses 35 through 37: only if sun, moon, and stars stop will Israel "cease from being a nation before me for ever."
THE LDS SCHOLAR: I agree, and I say so in the essay. The honest questioner adds that "they shall all know me" plainly hasn't happened yet, so the passage looks forward. And Christian institutions have moved. The Vatican's 2015 document, "The Gifts and the Calling of God Are Irrevocable," affirms that God's covenant with Israel has never been revoked.
ELI: And Latter-day Saints?
THE LDS SCHOLAR: An unusual angle. We speak of the "new and everlasting covenant." The doctrinal connector points to Doctrine and Covenants 22, verse 1: "a new and an everlasting covenant, even that which was from the beginning." New to the people receiving it, old in its origin. And in section 84 the Lord rebukes the early Saints until they "remember the new covenant, even the Book of Mormon." That reads Jeremiah as renewal with a gathered Israel, not replacement of Israel. Closer to Jeremiah's frame than Hebrews 8, verse 13.
ELI: The rabbi says that instinct, ancient restored rather than obsolete replaced, is closer to Jeremiah. And he notes that the Hebrew root for "new" also names the new moon. Which is the old moon coming back.
THE LDS SCHOLAR: But to be fair to the questioner's caution: our stress on gathering literal Israel gives us reason to share the Jewish objection to replacement, while our claim of a restored covenant brings back a softer version of what Jewish readers resist. The questioner's minimum: notice that the passage is addressed, word for word, to someone else first.
ELI: On the devotional side, here's the practical disciple's version I'll take home: the difference between a family that keeps rules because someone's checking and one that keeps them in an empty house. Which commandment do I keep only when observed?
NATHAN: (wincing) Ouch. Okay, Lamentations. Authorship.
THE LDS SCHOLAR: Tradition says Jeremiah. The Septuagint adds a prologue with Jeremiah sitting and weeping, and the Talmud says Jeremiah wrote his own book, Kings, and Lamentations. But the Hebrew book is anonymous, and most modern scholars doubt it. Liz Boase summarizes why. The acrostics don't follow the same alphabet order: chapter 1 differs from chapters 2 through 4, which suggests different poets. The theology isn't Jeremiah's. And Lamentations 4, verse 20 mourns Zedekiah as "the breath of our nostrils, the anointed of the LORD."
ELI: From the man who told him to surrender.
THE LDS SCHOLAR: Hard to hear it from Jeremiah. And there's a clue that cuts both ways. Lamentations 3, verse 55: "I called upon thy name, O LORD, out of the low dungeon." The Hebrew is bor, the same word as Jeremiah's cistern. But Lamentations says "waters flowed over mine head," and Jeremiah 38, verse 6 says pointedly, "there was no water." The details don't match.
NATHAN: Then the hardest one. God as enemy.
ELI: I need help here. I've sat with people in hospital waiting rooms. I don't want to hand them chapter 3, verse 10.
THE LDS SCHOLAR: Read it anyway. "He was unto me as a bear lying in wait." "He hath bent his bow, and set me as a mark for the arrow." In Lamentations, God isn't absent. God is the attacker. And the book accepts that the city earned it. "Jerusalem hath grievously sinned," while describing a starving city. The questioner says plainly that many readers, especially survivors of catastrophe, find that theology of blaming the victim intolerable.
ELI: So does verse 22 fix it?
THE LDS SCHOLAR: Here's the honest answer. The poem keeps going. Verse 42: "We have transgressed and have rebelled: thou hast not pardoned." Verse 44: "Thou hast covered thyself with a cloud, that our prayer should not pass through." And it ends asking God to "persecute and destroy them in anger."
NATHAN: And the academic scholar caught what might be the sharpest observation of the week. The verb for "pardon" in verse 42 is the same one God uses in the new covenant. 31, verse 34: "I will forgive their iniquity."
ELI: (slowly) So the forgiveness promised in Jeremiah 31 is exactly what Lamentations 3 says it hasn't received.
THE LDS SCHOLAR: Which is why I call 22 through 33 one voice in an argument, not its verdict. Tod Linafelt turns our attention to Daughter Zion in chapters 1 and 2, who refuses comfort and demands a response for her dying children, and argues the book never supplies one. Kathleen O'Connor argues the hope of chapter 3 is one voice among several, and that God's silence is part of what lets the book hold sorrow honestly.
ELI: Steel-man the devotional reading, though. The lesson puts 22 through 33 at the center, and I don't think that's wrong.
NATHAN: The doctrinal connector does it well. He takes us to Liberty Jail. Doctrine and Covenants 121: "O God, where art thou? And where is the pavilion that covereth thy hiding place?" That's Lamentations 3, verse 44, prayed from a cell. And section 121 answers the lament without condemning it: "thine adversity and thine afflictions shall be but a small moment." Lamentations has its own brief version in verse 57: "thou saidst, Fear not." The chapter holds a prayer shut out and a voice heard.
ELI: That I can bring into a hospital room. A lament that gets answered, not scolded.
NATHAN: And the synagogue's practice might be the wisest move of the week. On the Ninth of Av they read the whole book, including the last verse, chapter 5, verse 22: "thou hast utterly rejected us; thou art very wroth against us." They don't skip it. Then they repeat the verse before: "Turn thou us unto thee, O LORD, and we shall be turned; renew our days as of old."
ELI: The rabbi's line: "The tradition will not pretend the last word is gentle. It simply refuses to let it be the last thing said."
THE LDS SCHOLAR: The tradition didn't alter the text. It answered it. I think that's how to hold this week together. Jeremiah 31 promises that mourning will turn to joy. Lamentations records what the mourning sounded like before anyone knew whether it would. Neither book claims the turn has already happened.
ELI: So, for my hospital waiting room on Thursday night?
THE LDS SCHOLAR: Don't skip to verse 22 for them. Let them say verse 8 if they need to. It's in the Bible. It's allowed.
ELI: And the practical disciple's reading of verse 21: hope isn't a place you arrive and stay. You "recall" it, on purpose. And because the mercies are "new every morning," you receive them again every morning. Which is what President Ballard pleads for in the talk the lesson quotes. "You can always have hope. Always."
NATHAN: Let's get people into the week. The guide has five study sessions. This was the front door. All seven panel essays are linked there, including our guest's, which goes much deeper on the bullae, Mulek, and the two editions.
ELI: One thing each to carry in. Guest first.
THE LDS SCHOLAR: Read Jeremiah 32 and 1 Nephi 2 side by side. Lehi leaving the land of his inheritance. Jeremiah buying land he'll never farm. Same years, same city, opposite signs. Ask which one God is asking of you right now.
NATHAN: Mine: read 31, verses 31 through 37 in one sitting. Don't stop at 34 the way Hebrews does. Read the sun and moon and stars. Then read Hebrews 8, verse 13, and decide what you think the new covenant replaced, if anything.
ELI: And mine: read Lamentations 3 straight through, all 66 verses. Feel the whole arc, cloud and all. Then the next morning, before you get out of bed, say "great is thy faithfulness," with your eyes barely open.
NATHAN: Buy the field.
ELI: Pad the ropes.
THE LDS SCHOLAR: And put the deed in the jar. It's meant to be read later.
NATHAN: Five sessions. Start with session one.