Episode 320: Pete Ruins Everything on Jeremiah
In this episode of The Bible for Normal People, Pete has another go at ruining something. This week, he’s unpacking the book of Jeremiah and its interlocking themes of anguish, confusion, and hope. Along the way, Pete picks out some of the iconic Jeremiah verses commonly quoted in churches and Facebook posts and puts them back in the context of the text. It might make those verses less applicable to a high school graduation card, but it also helps readers participate in the ongoing journey to search for God’s promises in the face of crisis.
Mentioned in This Episode
Class: “What is Biblical Marriage?” with Jennifer Bird
Join: The Society of Normal People community
Support: www.thebiblefornormalpeople.com/give
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Pete: This is Pete Ruins Everything where assumptions come to die and nobody leaves happy. I'm Pete Enns.
Easy question to start us off today. What is biblical marriage?
Jared: Uh, glad to see we're starting off with some light banter today.
Pete: Yeah, well, you know, people say it all the time. The Bible clearly defines marriage, but I'm always like, are we talking about arranged marriages? Polygamy, levirate marriage, property transfers? Because the Bible's got options.
Jared: Yeah, exactly. Well, that's why we're excited about our upcoming class with Jennifer Bird on, you guessed it, biblical marriage.
Pete: Yeah. Jennifer is a New Testament scholar and the author of a fantastic book on this topic, and she basically says, let's slow down. Let's look at the actual passages people use, and let's ask whether they're doing what we think they're doing.
Jared: And in the class, Jennifer's gonna cover the four key passages that are most used to define biblical marriage, the Mount Rushmore of biblical marriage, if you will, and why they don't say what people sometimes think they do. Then she'll zoom out and ask, what does marriage actually look like across the Bible?
Not our idealized version of it, but the real thing, helping us understand the differences between marriage and the Bible and modern marriage. We're gonna look at some overlooked passages from the prophets and Jesus that dramatically shift how we approach the Bible for guidance about marriage and helpful ways to reframe the question entirely.
Pete: So if you've ever felt like the phrase biblical marriage is doing a lot of heavy lifting, or if you've quietly wondered whether we're oversimplifying things…
Jared: This is a class for you. So mark your calendar for Tuesday, March 31st from 8 to 9:30 PM Eastern Time, and go to thebiblefornormalpeople.com/biblicalmarriage to sign up today.
That's thebiblefornormalpeople.com/biblicalmarriage. Or sign up for our Society of Normal People at thebiblefornormalpeople.com/join where you can get all of our classes.
Pete: Hey folks, welcome to the first Pete Ruins episode of this new season, and this one is on the book of Jeremiah.
Now imagine being told that the thing you built, your entire identity around your nation, your religious symbols, your political system, your sense that God is on your side, all that is about to be wiped out, not reformed. Not purified, not gently corrected, but burned to the ground. And not only that, but God is the one doing it. Well, that's Jeremiah.
Jeremiah is not the prophet of personal inspiration. He's the prophet of worldview collapse. The Babylonians have destroyed the temple, ended the line of Davidic kings, and carted off the population of Jerusalem to Babylonian captivity. So this book takes us through the final decades of the Kingdom of Judah.
Through all this national confidence, as you can imagine, is pretty thin, but the people clung to one central conviction. We have the temple. We have the covenant. We are God's chosen people. We'll be just fine. Jeremiah says, no you won't. And that message does not make him popular. He's mocked, beaten, imprisoned, thrown into a cistern, accused of treason, branded unpatriotic.
And at one point he tries to quit, and another, he accuses God of deceiving him. This isn't the place to go to find inspirational quotes. That's my point. This is a man unraveling in real time as his world collapses around him. And then the collapse happens. In 586 BCE, the world as they knew it is gone, and with it, their confidence that God is on their side.
Jeremiah is the book that tries to make sense of that. And not by offering quick comfort, not by explaining away the disaster, not by saying everything happens for a reason. Jeremiah interprets the collapse as an act of God, not just a geopolitical collapse. The catastrophe does not signal God's weakness, but it exposes Israel's unfaithfulness.
The fall of Jerusalem is a covenantal consequence. And that makes this book dangerous because if Jeremiah's right, if he is right, then sacred institutions, they don't guarantee security. The temple, even the temple does not guarantee God's presence. Being the chosen people does not guarantee God's protection. Using religious language doesn't guarantee divine endorsement.
The book of Jeremiah is what happens when a community has to rethink everything. The historical Jeremiah, the prophet himself, he spoke into crisis. The book of Jeremiah is what that message became as scribes and theologians and communities continued wrestling with what that crisis meant for them.
Jeremiah is not simply prophecy, it is prophetic tradition in motion, right before our eyes.
All right, so here's what we're gonna do today. Four things. First, I want to give a summary and brief overview of the book as a whole. Second, we'll look at some major issues in modern critical scholarship. Third, we'll step back and trace some of the main theological themes that run through the book. And then last, we're going to spend a good chunk of time on some well-known passages that are often misunderstood because the context is ignored.
So that's the roadmap. Now let's begin with the 30,000 foot overview. First of all, Jeremiah, you may not know this is the longest book in the Bible. If you're counting words, not chapters, it's longer than Genesis, longer than Psalms, longer than Isaiah. And it spans roughly 40 years of Judah’s history from the reign of the Good King Josiah in the late seventh century, BCE.
He died around 609, through political instability as Babylonian pressure mounts. This is happening already in the 590’s, then to the destruction of Jerusalem and the early years of exile, so that's the year of 586 and thereafter. Jeremiah is a tricky book to navigate. It doesn't unfold chronologically.
Events from different decades are arranged thematically rather than sequentially, and that can be confusing. Speeches delivered early in Jeremiah's career may appear next to narratives from much later. This book was clearly edited by somebody. It's also a literary mosaic. We have poetic oracles as one might expect from a prophet.
We also have extended sermons written in prose a couple of times. Jeremiah acts out his prophecies, smashing a clay jar, wearing a yoke. There are intensely personal laments, in which Jeremiah just wrestles flat out with God. Then there are biographical narratives describing Jeremiah's political troubles.
And near the end, there are oracles directed at foreign nations, reminding us that Judah’s fate unfolds in the shadow of larger empires. There is a lot happening in this book, so the book moves through decades of warning, political turmoil, siege destruction, and displacement, let's call it enforced migration.
It preserves the voice of a prophet speaking before, during, and after the biggest crisis in the Hebrew Bible, the fall of God's chosen city, Jerusalem. But the bad news is only half the book's purpose. The other half is to insist that judgment is not abandonment, even in exile. The relationship between God and his people is not erased.
Jeremiah reframes disaster not as the end of the story, but as a turning point within it. In other words, this book is doing theological repair work. It is dismantling false assurances. It is redefining what covenant faithfulness actually means, and it is preserving the possibility of hope after collapse.
Jeremiah refuses denial or easy optimism about what's happening. And he also refuses despair. The world you built may fall apart, but that does not mean God has disappeared. And once we see that, the shape of the book begins to make a little bit more sense. And that leads to the next question. How did this complex layer book come to be?
We're now heading to the question of authorship. See, once you read Jeremiah carefully, you don't even have to get through the whole thing, but once you read it carefully, something becomes obvious very quickly. This book does not read like a diary, as I mentioned. It doesn't move chronologically, it repeats itself.
Some sections are tightly poetic and metaphorical. Others are long sermon-like prose. The tone shifts, the theological emphasis sometimes feels slightly different. Makes you ask, you know, what exactly are we reading here? Well. To get a handle on that, let, let's begin with a historical anchor. I, and pretty much everyone agrees that a historical prophet named Jeremiah was active in the late seventh and early sixth centuries, BCE.
The book names some of Judah’s kings, Josiah, Jehoiakim, Hezekiah. It references verifiable political events like the rise of Babylon in the wake of the power vacuum left by the demise of the Assyrians and 612 BCE, and it situates Jeremiah squarely in the decades leading up to the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem.
Now, that's the anchor, but we're told something tantalizing and fascinating in chapter 36 that signals what is to come. Jeremiah dictates his words to his scribe, Baruch, that scroll is read publicly. King Jehoiakim doesn't like it, cuts it up and burns it, and then Jeremiah dictates it again, and the text says many similar words were added.
The second version is not the same as the first. Now that line is doing a lot of work. Already within the book itself, we see the process of writing, of rewriting and expanding. The book itself signals what Biblical scholars talk about and talk a lot about, which is the complexity of the authorship and the transmission of the book of Jeremiah.
Lemme throw a couple names here 'cause they're important people. In the early 20th century, a Norwegian scholar named Sigmund Mowinckel proposed that Jeremiah contained multiple literary levels. Like there's a poetic level, there's a biographical, a narrative level, there's a prose sermon level, that kind of stuff.
And he suggested they reflected different, discreet stages of preservation. They were added at different times, these levels, and that's one theory that tries to account for the character of the book. More recently, the German scholar Winfried Thiel argued that the long prose sections, especially those that emphasize obedience to the covenant, centralized worship in the temple in Jerusalem and language that echoes the book of Deuteronomy, that those sections, they reflect the influence of what scholars call the Deuteronomistic school.
Now that's really nerdy. And some of you have heard this before, 'cause I mentioned this Deuteronomistic school in other, um, episodes because you have to, he is sort of all over the place.
But just to explain for a quick hot second here. Deuteronomistic Theology is the theological vibe that you see in the book of Deuteronomy and also in the books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings. Together they're called the Deuteronomistic History. It's a telling of history from a particular theological point of view.
They all emphasize that obedience to God's covenant leads to blessing, and disobedience leads to curse and exile. Large portions of Jeremiah, especially the prose sermons, sound like they're speaking that deuteronomistic theological dialect, and that has led many scholars to propose a theory. The historical Jeremiah, the prophet, he delivered poetic oracles of warning before the fall.
Scribes from Deuteronomistic circles preserved his message and expanded it in ways that interpreted the fall as a consequence of breaking the covenant. Again, that's a central Deuteronomistic theme. In other words, the book of Jeremiah reflects both the prophet in his time and the theological community that later processed his message.
And by the way, that is a common way of describing a good number of books of the Hebrew Bible, but we can't get into that now. Anyway, one more name. The Scottish Scholar William McKane has a different idea rather than neat layers that come one after the other. He famously described Jeremiah as a rolling corpus, a body of tradition that, like tumbleweed, grew over time.
In other words, the book is layered but not a result of neatly structured theological editing, one after the other, but more organic, you know, not, not, not systematic. Anyway, if those nuances mean nothing to you, don't worry. Here's the bottom line. There are, to my knowledge, no, zero contemporary scholars who think the book of Jeremiah is a word for word transcript taken down exactly as the prophets spoke it.
The real scholarly debate is not whether the book was shaped and edited, everyone agrees it was. The debate is about how much shaping happened, how it happened, when it happened, and by whom. And these questions cannot be answered with certainty, but scholars try to make sense of them. Now, another scholarly issue since we're on the topic, an even bigger one, and you gotta put your nerd hats on here just for a minute, but I think this is worth it.
Some of you may remember from other episodes, just you know, on your own that by the third century BCE, the Hebrew Bible was being translated into Greek. Why? Because Greece, under Alexander the Great, conquered them, and within a couple of generations, Greek was the dominant language. Okay? Who cares about that?
Well, when you compare, hang with me folks. When you compare the Hebrew text of Jeremiah, and for you nerds out there, that's called the Masoretic text, which most English Bible translations follow. But when you compare that Hebrew text of Jeremiah with the Greek translation that you find in copies of the Septuagint, that's just a fancy word for the Greek translation, but you notice something very odd.
The Greek version of Jeremiah is about one-eighth shorter than the Hebrew. That's about 2,600 words. That's huge. Entire passages in the Hebrew are missing in the Greek. The arrangement of material differs significantly. Most notably, the oracles against the nations appear in the middle of the book, in the Greek version, but near the end in the Hebrew version.
Some sections in the Greek are more concise, less repetitive. And shorter. Now, for a long time, scholars debated what to make of this. Did the Greek translators simply abbreviate on a whim? Was he just bad at his job? Was he hungover? What's going on here? Well, those are all theories, but they don't fit the facts.
We know what's happening here thanks to the Dead Sea Scrolls, and this is where it gets a little bit nerdy. We know from these Deads Sea Scrolls that the Greek version is not a bad translation of the Hebrew text. Rather and let this sink in. The Greek version was translated from another Hebrew version of Jeremiah and probably an older one.
Let me be more specific, and this is huge. I keep saying that, but it's true. Among the Dead Sea Scrolls, fragments of both Hebrew versions were found. The shorter one that the Greek was translated from, and the longer one that is the basis for our modern Bibles today. That means, first couple of centuries before Christ, more than one Hebrew edition of Jeremiah existed, both partially preserved for us among the Dead Sea Scrolls.
This is significant. It tells us Jeremiah was still being stabilized. The book of Jeremiah was still being stabilized centuries after the historical prophet lived. Now I know for some, I have sensibilities to this. I know for some that that might be very destabilizing to hear, but step back, Jeremiah, the book of Jeremiah is a book born out of catastrophe.
It's a book attempting to interpret the national and theological collapse that reverberated across generations. Why would we expect that process to produce a single frozen edition immediately? Never to change, never to be added to? See, put it this way, the historical Jeremiah, the prophet himself, he spoke into crisis.
The book of Jeremiah is what that message became as scribes and theologians and communities continued wrestling with what that crisis meant for them. And that helps explain why the book feels layered. It is layered. It helps explain why some sections sound raw and poetic, and others reflective and sermonic.
It helps explain why repetition appears. Traditions were accumulated rather than trimmed. It helps explain why the book resists tidy outlines and why it can be so hard to follow. Jeremiah is not simply prophecy, it is prophetic tradition in motion right before our eyes. Some may say this undermines the book's integrity.
I say it reveals scripture as something living, shaped in history, responding to history and growing over time.
Okay, let's move now to theological themes. If we move past individual verses and look at the whole landscape. Here's what we see. Jeremiah is forcing a recalibration, a resetting of Israel's theology. Its understanding of God, of covenant and history, and that recalibration happens under pressure, crisis, catastrophe.
And I wanna mention briefly five theological themes that reflect that theological recalibration. So first is having a covenant without guarantees. And I mentioned this briefly earlier, but let's unpack it just a tiny bit more. Jeremiah attacks the illusion that the temple guarantees safety. Over time, Israel's great promises like land monarchy, God is in the temple.
All that could begin to sound like guarantees. You know, we're chosen, we have the temple, God will protect us, but Jeremiah dismantles that logic. Covenant is not blanket immunity. Election is not insulation from consequences. Sacred rituals are not a substitute for justice again and again. Jeremiah links the coming catastrophe, not to divine weakness, but to covenant violation, idolatry, violence, economic injustice, exploitation of the vulnerable.
In Jeremiah's theology, the fall of Jerusalem does not contradict God's covenant with them. It reveals that covenant has teeth, and that's the first theological calibration. God is faithful, but faithfulness does not mean perpetual protection of corrupt systems. A second theological theme in the book is the theme of deception, especially self-deception.
And this ties nicely to the first theme. Jeremiah repeatedly accuses leaders, priests, and prophets of proclaiming peace, peace when there is no peace. That phrase suggests a religious culture that has learned how to talk about God in ways that soothe rather than confront. God thinks what we think, a common corruption, evident even today.
Jeremiah's role is to expose and puncture that false reassurance and that puts 'em at odds, not just with political power, but with other prophets. In this book, prophecy itself becomes contested territory. Who is actually speaking for God? The optimistic voices promising stability or the lone voice announcing collapse?
Jeremiah reframes faithfulness as truth-telling in the face of denial. That's the second recalibration. True prophecy may sound disloyal. Unpatriotic true theology may feel destabilizing. But comforting illusions, no, that's no replacement for covenant fidelity. Okay, a third theme is Jeremiah's reframing of the relationship between God and Empire.
Babylonian exile is not portrayed as an accident of history, nor is it a sign that Israel's God has been defeated. Shockingly, Babylon becomes God's instrument. King Nebuchadnezzar, the Babylonian king, is even called “my servant.” That does not sanctify empire. Jeremiah still announces judgment on the nations, but it does mean that God's sovereignty extends beyond Israel's borders.
The exile is not outside the divine purpose, and that introduces attention. If God can work through empires, even hostile empires and history becomes the arena of divine mystery. God's purposes are not always aligned with national survival, and that's a hard pill to swallow, but it is central to Jeremiah's interpretation of events.
The fourth recalibration deals with Jeremiah himself. Unlike many prophetic books, Jeremiah gives us at length the interior life of the prophet, his laments, his anger, his exhaustion. He accuses God of deceiving him. And like Job, he curses the day he was born. He tries to stop speaking, only to find the message burning in his bone.
Jeremiah is called by God, but his life is no cakewalk. A prophet's task does not eliminate anguish. It includes it. God is sovereign, but not transparent. God is active, but not easily explained. In a book about collapse, that honesty matters and Jeremiah does not give us a polished theology of suffering.
He gives us a raw one that he himself is living. And that brings us to the fifth theological theme, hope. Jeremiah is not only about judgment. Scattered throughout the book are promises of return, restoration, rebuilding. But the hope is different now. It's no longer tethered to the assumption that Temple and monarchy guarantee stability.
It is hope that survives their loss. The people in Babylon are told to settle in exile, plant trees, build houses, prepare for 70 years. That is not a short-term optimism. It's a long haul. Jeremiah's hope is not denial of collapse. It is hope that has passed through collapse. But here's the thing. In my experience, most readers don't read Jeremiah as a complex, layered, sweeping, theological recalibration.
They isolate passages very much out of context, and that means missing Jeremiah and what he's trying to say. So here, let's slow down and look closely at some of those passages that need to be recalibrated for us so that we can see that Jeremiah undoes our assumptions as well.
So let's begin with perhaps the most famous of all, Jeremiah 29:11. If you've spent any time in Christian spaces, you've heard this one. ‘For surely I know the plans I have for you’, says the Lord, ‘plans for welfare and not for harm. To give you a future and a hope.’ It's hard to overstate how beloved this verse is.
Graduation cards, mission trip devotionals, personal call narratives. Moments of reassurance in times of uncertainty, and on its own, it sounds like a promise of personal destiny. God has a plan for my life. God is orchestrating my future. God will bring me success. But here's the thing, Jeremiah 29 is a letter, a letter sent to exiles in Babylon after the first wave of deportations around 598.
Jerusalem has not yet fully fallen, but many leaders have already been taken. And what does Jeremiah tell them? Well, Jeremiah 29:11, he tells 'em to build houses, plant gardens, marry, have children, seek the welfare of Babylon. In other words, settle in 'cause you're not going home anytime soon. He even says explicitly that the exile will last 70 years, 70 years.
Now, side issue, it winds up lasting 47 years, but let's not quibble. 70 is either, probably most likely a round number indicating a complete time of divine will happening, like divine completeness. Or perhaps, I heard this years ago and, and I sort of like this. I can't verify it. I certainly wouldn't, uh, throw myself on the sword for it.
But the 70 can also be a reference to the building of the temple in the year 516. The rebuilding of the temple. In other words, 586 to 516 is about this. 70 years, and that might be a theological statement that you're not back in the land until the temple is rebuilt. Anyway, this means that many of the people hearing this promise of Jeremiah in 29:11, well they would die in Babylon.
So when Jeremiah says, I know the plans I have for you, the ‘you’ is not an individual seeking career clarity. It is a displaced community facing generational exile, and the promise is not an immediate turnaround. It's a long-haul survival. God has not abandoned you. Your story is not over, but your story continues in a foreign land, and get used to it.
When we detach that verse from exile, from catastrophe, we leave the historical context of this passage and enter into a more personalized reading, and I get it. People do that, and I don't lose sleep over it. But if you're going to personalize it, at least pay attention to the passage in context. Accept from this passage that God's plan for you may be dislocation, disorientation, unwanted change, but also know that your promised exile is not the final word. That's very different from God will make your five-year plan succeed.
And this sets a pattern we'll see again. Jeremiah's most-quoted promises are embedded in catastrophe. If we don't hear the catastrophe, we mishear the promise. Okay, second passage. Here's a hot number, Jeremiah 1:5. Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you, and before you were born, I consecrated you.
I appointed you a prophet to the nations. This verse shows up in various conversations. Sometimes it's used in debates about establishing when life begins. More on that in a minute. Sometimes it's invoked to reassure someone that God has a personal plan for them for eternity. Sometimes it becomes a kind of vocational promise.
God has uniquely wired you for a specific destiny, and you need to find God's will for your life. Now, none of those applications are malicious, but they're all me-centered. You know what I mean? So we need to ask, what is Jeremiah 1 actually saying to those in the deep past, not to us. While this verse comes in what scholars call a prophetic call narrative, it's a genre.
You see similar patterns with the call of Moses and Exodus, or with Isaiah in Isaiah chapter 6. What happens? God calls the prophet first objects. I can't do it. God reassures them and then the commission is given. That's the pattern we see here too. When God says, before I formed you in the womb, I knew you.
It's a response to Jeremiah's lack of confidence. Oh Lord, God, truly, I don't know how to speak, for I am only a boy. God is reassuring Jeremiah that yes, indeed he is being appointed to speak into national collapse. He's being assigned a task that will define his life and frankly ruin it, because Jeremiah's calling does not lead to prestige, at least to rejection, imprisonment, and isolation.
If we read Jeremiah 1:5 as a sentimental affirmation of personal purpose or some timeless principle, we miss the edge of it. This is a call into conflict, a call into suffering, a call into announcing judgment to your own people. It's not ‘God has a wonderful plan for your life.’ It's ‘you have been set apart for a difficult vocation in a moment of crisis,’ and God is giving Jeremiah understandably much needed solace and encouragement.
I'm with you. I'm always with you. I've always been with you even before you knew it. Now I cautiously want to dip my toes here into something that I think we need to talk about, and it would be strange not to mention it, and that's this. Jeremiah 1:5 is frequently cited in debates about abortion, namely as evidence that personhood begins at conception or even before conception.
The reasoning is straightforward. If God knew Jeremiah before he was formed in the womb. Then that must imply a personal identity at that stage. I wanna speak into that just a little bit. In the context of a prophetic call, as I said, this is a reassurance to Jeremiah that he is indeed capable of fulfilling a dangerous and frightening call, and that reassurance is hyperbolic.
It's exaggeration. It's similar to another passage which can trigger people, but, uh, Psalm 51:5. Here, David is lamenting a sin with Bathsheba and says, I was born guilty, a sinner when my mother conceived me. This is taken by some Christians as proof of original sin in the Old Testament, but it's not, it's hyperbole, a way of saying, I am more sinful than I can possibly express.
Seeking in Jeremiah 1:5 an affirmation that the fetus as a person is possible, but it is by no means obvious. This verse should never be prefaced with, “as the Bible clearly says,” and in all this, the gravitas of Jeremiah 1:5 is buried under an issue that it was never meant to address, such as what happens when we prooftext.
Thinking our own circumstances are the center of biblical interpretation. When we left verses out of catastrophic historical settings and turned them into abstract universal principles, we flatten the text by making it all about us. Jeremiah 1:5 is about vocation in a moment of collapse, not about drafting modern legislation.
Now the third one, we move into darker territory here, folks. in Jeremiah 7, and then again a little bit in chapter 19. The prophet refers to a place called the Valley of Ben-Hinnom. Just outside of Jerusalem, that means literally the valley of the Son of Hinnom, whoever that is. And in Hebrew it's, and I have, I'm saying this for a reason, not just to talk about Hebrew, but this is important.
In Hebrew, it's Gey Ben Hinnom. Gey, valley. Ben, son. Hinnom, some guy. Later in Greek, the Ben is dropped, which leaves you with Gey Hinnom. Which then gets sort of morphed into Gehenna. And if you've read the New Testament, that word might sound familiar, but let's stay with Jeremiah. In Jeremiah's time, the Valley of Hinnom had become associated with child sacrifice.
The prophet accuses the people of burning their sons and daughters as something he insists God “did not command, nor did it enter my mind.” Whether this whole child sacrifice thing reflects widespread practice or maybe prophetic exaggeration, that's a legitimate debate among biblical scholars.
But what matters for Jeremiah's rhetoric is clear. The valley becomes a symbol of covenantal collapse and horror. It is the place where idolatry reaches its most grotesque form, child sacrifice. It is a site of outrageous betrayal of the covenant. It is the embodiment of everything that has gone wrong.
And then in chapter 19, Jeremiah announces that this valley will be renamed no longer the Valley of Ben-Hinnom, but it'll be called the Valley of Slaughter. It will be filled not with ritual sacrifice, but with the corpses of those killed by the invading Babylonians as an act of God's judgment. Now, just pause there for a second.
What is Jeremiah doing? He's using a real geographical location outside of Jerusalem as a symbol of judgment. It is political. It is historical. It's about the coming destruction of the city. It is not in any way a metaphysical description of the afterlife. Jeremiah is not describing eternal conscious torment.
He is not mapping out heaven and hell. He is announcing the consequences of covenant collapse in his world. Now let's do this. Fast forward a few centuries. Here's the short story, and I want to acknowledge it. During the second temple period, a period between roughly 516 and then around the time of Jesus.
During that second temple period, Jewish literature begins to use Gehenna more as a place of eschatological punishment, sort of end of the world stuff. And by the time of Jesus, Gehenna has become shorthand for that kind of divine judgment. And in the New Testament, Jesus uses that language in ways that are vivid and alarming. Namely in Matthew chapter 5.
But here's the crucial point, and, and again, this can get rather messy, but I, I'm, I'm trying to sort of always bring us up to the surface to see the big picture. When Jeremiah speaks of the Valley of Hinnom, he's not constructing a doctrine of hell. He's deploying a powerful image drawn from a specific location associated with covenantal corruption.
The development from physical valley to a symbol of judgment to eschatological imagery, that happens over time, and that's another example of something we've seen already in this episode. The Bible itself develops, Jeremiah develops now. Images evolve, traditions deepen. Jeremiah gives us a historical judgment oracle. Later Jewish thought transforms that image into apocalyptic language.
Christian theology long after the time of Jesus eventually builds doctrines on that imagery, which is our doctrine of hell. But we should not collapse all of that into Jeremiah. If we do, we flatten out history and overread the text and then misunderstand it. Again, Jeremiah's imagery is rooted in catastrophe.
It's about what happens when a community abandons justice and covenant fidelity. The valley of Hinnom is not about scary individuals into religious compliance by threatening postmortem punishment. It is about confronting a nation with the consequences of violence and idolatry.
Now, if I may, and I may, 'cause, this is my podcast. I wanna make a comment or two on the New Testament. Gehenna appears about a dozen times in the New Testament, mostly in Matthew. And the way Jesus uses that word, which is unfortunately translated as hell, which is what confuses people. It should never be translated as hell. 'Cause that brings up all these medieval images that we have.
The way Jesus uses the word suggests he may not mean what we have come to think the word means, after all. Think about this. What sort of things would land one in Gehenna according to Jesus? Is that a failure to confess that Jesus is Lord? No blasphemy? No, it's, for example, getting angry or insulting your brother or sister.
And I just think we should sit with that for a second. It's hard for me to imagine that getting angry results in eternal conscious torment. It seems that Jesus's use of Johanna is also symbolic. Symbolic of what? Well, here's my take. It's symbolic of being on the outside of the kingdom of God, that Jesus is inaugurating right in their midst.
Do you want to be a part of this or don't you? Well, the Kingdom of God is about inner transformation, not outward performance. Anyway, that's just food for thought. And this brings us to another passage in Jeremiah 7, one that is even more destabilizing because in that same chapter, Jeremiah says something that sounds like it contradicts the Torah itself.
That is Jeremiah 7:22. This is right in the middle of what's called the Temple sermon. Jeremiah says ‘for in the day that I brought them out of the land of Egypt.’ Again, remember, Jeremiah is speaking for God in the first person. That's what prophets do. I hope that's not confusing. Lemme read it again.
‘For in the day that I brought them out of the land of Egypt, I did not speak to your ancestors or command them concerning burnt offerings and sacrifices, but this command I gave them, obey my voice.’ Now if you know your Bible even a little, that should make you blink because large portions of Exodus, Leviticus, the numbers are duh, devoted to sacrificial instruction.
So what is Jeremiah saying? Did God not command any of that? Did Jeremiah forget? Leviticus? Is this a contradiction? This is one of those moments where the Bible does not feel tidy. Now there are, as you can guess, a few ways scholars have approached this. One possibility is rhetorical hyperbole. That word keeps coming up when we talk about prophets and for very good reason, and we just saw this, right?
Prophets often exaggerate to make a point. In this reading, Jeremiah isn't denying the existence of sacrifice laws. He's hyperbolically, subordinating them. He's saying obedience matters way more than ritual, which is very similar to what Hosea and Amos say, for example. Now, some scholars suggest another approach.
They say that Israel's sacrificial system actually evolved over time, and that prophetic tradition sometimes preserved a memory of covenant faith centered more on obedience than on ritual precision. So ritual was a later addition to Israel's religion, and that's quite possible. This fits with theories of the authorship of the Pentateuch as being exilic or post-exilic, and especially the priestly legislation of the so-called P source, which is late seventh century into the sixth century and beyond.
That stuff all came later. That's the argument. Now still, others argue that Jeremiah is participating more in sort of like an internal theological debate within Israel's tradition. One that prioritizes ethical fidelity over rituals and sacrifices, whichever explanation you find most persuasive. Well, one thing is clear.
Jeremiah is destabilizing the assumption that performing rituals equals faithfulness. And I think that's the main point. He's confronting a people who believe that temple worship guarantees divine favor. And he says, at the very least he says this. When I brought your ancestors out of Egypt, the heart of the covenant was obedience, not rituals.
Now, that doesn't necessarily erase sacrifice. It doesn't delete Leviticus. It doesn't mean ritual never mattered, but it does mean that within scripture itself, there are voices pushing and pulling against each other. So as I see it, this is just my opinion, Jeremiah is not anti-Torah. He's against the reduction of the covenant to ritual performance.
Again, a common theme among the prophets. If we expect scripture to function as a single flat system with no tension, this verse becomes a problem. But if we understand scripture as a conversation across time, wrestling with what faithfulness means, then Jeremiah 7:22 becomes a window into that process.
Here in the midst of impending catastrophe, a prophet insists that covenant is not secured by sacrifice. It's secured by obedience. And again, notice the pattern. Jeremiah's sharpest theological claims emerge under the pressure of collapse of catastrophe. When systems fail, when institutions crumble. When temple theology proves inadequate, the question becomes, what actually lies at the heart of covenant life?
Jeremiah's answer is not more ritual precision. It is obedience of another sort. Which now prepares us for perhaps the most famous theological text in the entire book, at least for Christians, the so-called New Covenant Passage, and this is where Christian readers often move too quickly, and as a result, misread. The passage is Jeremiah 31:31-34, and it begins this way.
‘The days are surely coming,’ says the Lord, ‘when I will make a new covenant with the House of Israel and the house of Judah.’ For Christians, this language is electric. The phrase “new covenant” appears in the New Testament. It echoes Jesus' words in the Last Supper. It becomes central to Christian theology.
It is even embedded in the very term New Testament. And very often it's read as replacement language, supersessionism, where Christianity renders Judaism null and void. The old covenant failed the new covenant succeeds. Judaism gives way to Christianity. Law is replaced by grace. This passage is asked to carry a lot, I'll tell you that, but let's slow down.
Let me read the entire passage. It's only four verses, but I think it's important to just get a feel for what's being said here. “‘The days are surely coming,’ says the Lord, ‘when I will make a new covenant with the House of Israel and the house of Judah.’” Note who the covenant is with. “‘It would not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt.
A covenant that they broke, though I was their husband,’ says the Lord. ‘But this is the covenant that I will make with the House of Israel after those days,’ says the Lord.” What's he gonna do? “‘I will put my law within them. I will write it on their hearts and I will be their God and they shall be my people.
No longer shall they teach one another or say to each other, know the Lord. For they shall all know me from the least of them to the greatest,’ says the Lord. ‘For I will forgive their iniquity and remember their sin no more.’” First notice again, what I tried to highlight as I was reading it, who this promise is addressed to the House of Israel and the house of Judah.
This is an exilic text. It is spoken to a displaced, fractured people. Jeremiah is not announcing the abolition of Israel's covenant. That would be bizarre, since they are being judged by it. Rather, he is announcing the covenant's renewal and intensification. Second, notice what is actually new. Jeremiah does not say the Torah will disappear.
He does not say law is canceled. He does not contrast law with grace. He says the Torah will be written on their hearts, Israel and Judah's hearts. In other words, the problem was not the covenant itself. The problem was the people's inability to live by it, and God's response is to have that Torah not eliminated, but written on their hearts.
See, the new covenant is not different from the old covenant in the content. It's still Torah. And that Torah, which was once inscribed on tablets of stone, will be internalized, inscribed on the heart. That is an intensification of Torah, not a replacement. Israel will be restored. That reassures the exiles that the covenant relationship is not over.
The rupture is not permanent, and in fact, God will take steps to make sure it doesn't happen again. Now, of course, early Christians read this passage in light of Jesus. The language of new covenant becomes attached to the death of Christ. Paul reflects on covenant in deeply creative ways. The author of Hebrews quotes Jeremiah 31 at length to make a point Jeremiah never intended to make, but you see, that's okay.
That's, that's part of the reception history, as scholars call it. It's part of the reception history of Jeremiah 31, how its meaning moves and shifts and is reapplied over time. But let's just be straight about this. Jeremiah does not say that the old covenant was a mistake. The old covenant was inadequate.
He says the covenant relationship fractured, but God is not done with it. It will be renewed and intensified, and that's a very different claim and it prevents Christians from using this text as a weapon against Judaism. It also prevents us from flattening Jeremiah into a Christian prooftext factory.
Jeremiah 31 is about covenant surviving catastrophe. It is about forgiveness on the far side of failure. It's about the possibility that even when temple, monarchy, and land collapse, all three of which are at the heart of Israel's identity, when those things collapse, the relationship between God and his people can endure, and it will.
That may feel like a fragile hope. But it only makes sense because the book has forced us through collapse first. All right, so let, let's bring this to an end here. Um, what do we do with Jeremiah? Well, Jeremiah is not tidy. It doesn't offer a simple system. It doesn't protect sacred institutions from critique, including our own.
It does something harder. It insists that catastrophe does not lie outside the covenant story, even if Jeremiah himself doubts that at times. That's the claim running through everything we've seen. The destruction of Jerusalem is not the end of Israel's relationship with God, but neither is it denied. It is instead absorbed into the story.
Jeremiah forces a theological recalibration. God is not domesticated by institutions. God is not defeated by empire. Covenant is not canceled by failure. Repeating the American story that America was founded as a Christian nation and always will be, well that falls into the same trap of Jerusalem crying the temple, the temple, the temple. We cannot rest on our past as a way of securing the future and keeping things stable. Jeremiah can speak to any group that assumes that stability proves divine favor, that sacred architecture guarantees permanence. And anytime anyone confuses simple religious continuity with covenant faithfulness.
Institutions can fall, structures can collapse. Theological systems can prove inadequate, and they always do sooner or later. And God can still be God. But, and this is crucial, that hope only emerges after illusion is stripped away. If we read Jeremiah as a collection of inspiring verses, we're gonna miss all this.
But Jeremiah, on its own terms is still worth reading today. Right folks. Thanks for hanging in there. This was a lot I know, but I appreciate you being here, hanging in and tuning in, and journeying with me through the book of Jeremiah and I'll see you next time.
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