The Covenant Reaches the Heart

In the Hebrew Bible this verse is numbered 30:25, closing the previous chapter, so the Hebrew chapter 31 begins at “The people which were left of the sword”. The covenant formula of 30:22 is turned round: there “ye shall be my people” came first; here God speaks of himself first.

The survivors “left of the sword” who found grace in the wilderness recall the exodus generation, delivered from Pharaoh’s sword (Exodus 18:4), and the honeymoon of 2:2, “thou wentest after me in the wilderness”. “To cause him to rest” is the rest in the land promised in Deuteronomy 12:9–10.

“Of old” is literally from afar, merachoq: the LORD appears from a distance, as he would have to a people in a distant land. “Drawn thee” is mashakh, to draw with a cord, the picture of Hosea 11:4, “I drew them with cords of a man, with bands of love”.

“Tabrets” are hand drums, the toph Miriam took up at the sea when the women “went out after her with timbrels and with dances” (Exodus 15:20). The rebuilt virgin of Israel picks up the instrument of the first deliverance.

“Eat them as common things” is literally profane them. Leviticus 19:23–25 kept the fruit of newly planted trees untouched for three years, holy to the LORD in the fourth, and free to eat in the fifth. The promise looks five years ahead, to a harvest the planters live long enough to enjoy.

After the kingdom divided, Jeroboam set up golden calves at Bethel and Dan to stop northerners going up to Jerusalem (1 Kings 12:26–29). The watchmen on Ephraim’s hills, who once kept that border, will call the north to go up to Zion.

“O LORD, save thy people” is the cry hoshia’, the word behind “Save now, I beseech thee” in Psalm 118:25 and behind the later shout of Hosanna. The Greek Septuagint reads it as a report, “The LORD has saved his people”. Israel is called “the chief of the nations”, first among them.

In 30:6 men clutched their sides like women in labour; here real women with child and in labour are part of the returning crowd. “A great company” is qahal gadol, a great assembly, the word for Israel gathered as a congregation.

Israel was called “my son, even my firstborn” in Exodus 4:22. Ephraim, the younger son of Joseph, received the firstborn’s blessing when Jacob crossed his hands (Genesis 48:14–19). The weeping and supplication may be tears of repentance or of relief; the verse does not say which.

The nations are summoned as heralds, sent to the far coastlands with the news. Deuteronomy 30:3 had promised to “gather thee from all the nations, whither the LORD thy God hath scattered thee”. Isaiah 40:11 gives the shepherd’s care its most tender form: he “shall gently lead those that are with young”.

Two legal verbs of buying back stand side by side: padah, to ransom, and ga’al, the act of the kinsman redeemer who buys back a relative’s land or freedom (Leviticus 25:25; Ruth 4). “Him that was stronger than he” echoes Psalm 35:10, the poor delivered “from him that is too strong for him”.

“Flow together” is nahar, to stream like a river, the verb of Isaiah 2:2, where “all nations shall flow unto” the LORD’s house. Wheat, wine and oil are the covenant blessings of Deuteronomy 7:13. “A watered garden” is the image of Isaiah 58:11.

Young men and old dance together; the generations are not separated. Psalm 30:11 speaks in the same terms, “Thou hast turned for me my mourning into dancing”, and Esther 9:22 records a month “turned unto them from sorrow to joy”.

“Fatness” is deshen, the rich fat of the sacrifices. The priests were fed from the portions of offerings (Leviticus 7:31–34), so a satisfied priesthood means a people bringing offerings in abundance. The same word returns in verse 40.

Rachel was the mother of Joseph and Benjamin, grandmother of Ephraim, and 1 Samuel 10:2 places her tomb “in the border of Benjamin”, the territory of Ramah. “They were not” is literally “he is not”, the phrase of Reuben and Jacob over the lost Joseph (Genesis 37:30, 42:36).

“Thy work shall be rewarded” is found word for word in 2 Chronicles 15:7, a prophet’s encouragement to King Asa. Rachel died giving birth to Benjamin (Genesis 35:16–18), and some read her “work” as the labour of bearing the children she now mourns; that is an inference.

“Hope in thine end” pairs the same two words as “an expected end” in the letter to the exiles, acharit and tiqvah (29:11). The promise made to the exiles in Babylon is here spoken to their mother.

“I have surely heard” doubles the verb. The untrained young bull is Hosea’s image of the north: “Israel slideth back as a backsliding heifer” (Hosea 4:16), and “Ephraim is as an heifer that is taught” (Hosea 10:11). Ephraim now admits he needed the training.

Smiting the thigh was a gesture of grief and remorse; Ezekiel is told to do it in 21:12. “The reproach of my youth” recalls Psalm 25:7, “Remember not the sins of my youth”, and the charge in 3:25 that Israel had sinned “from our youth”.

Two doubled verbs carry the verse: “remembering I remember him” and “having mercy I will have mercy”. The second is racham, from rechem, the womb, a mother’s kind of compassion. “My bowels are troubled” means the inner organs churn, as in Isaiah 63:15 and Song of Solomon 5:4.

“Waymarks” are tsiyyunim, stone markers along a road. “High heaps” is tamrurim, guideposts, and a word spelled identically means bitterness: it is the “bitter weeping” of Rachel in verse 15. The road markers sound exactly like her grief.

“Go about” is to waver, turning this way and that. “Created” is bara, the verb of Genesis 1:1. “Woman” is neqevah, female, the word of “male and female” in Genesis 1:27, and “man” is gever, the strong man who in 30:6 held his sides like a woman in labour.

“Habitation of justice” is used of the LORD himself in 50:7, where Babylon’s enemies call him “the habitation of justice”. Here it becomes a greeting for the land. “Mountain of holiness” is Zion, the “holy mountain” of Isaiah 11:9 and Zechariah 8:3.

“Husbandmen” are ploughmen, the same class who covered their heads in shame during the drought (14:4). “They that go forth with flocks” are shepherds moving between seasonal pastures. Town and open country are settled together.

“Weary” is ayefah, faint with thirst, the word of Psalm 63:1, “a dry and thirsty land”. “Satiated” is ravah, to drench, the watered garden of verse 12 again. The verbs are in the Hebrew perfect, spoken as if already done.

“My sleep was sweet unto me” uses the words of Proverbs 3:24, “thy sleep shall be sweet”. Zechariah describes being woken for a vision “as a man that is wakened out of his sleep” (Zechariah 4:1). The one pleasant sleep in the Book of Jeremiah follows a vision of return.

Hosea 2:23 has the same picture: “I will sow her unto me in the earth”, a play on Jezreel, “God sows”. The land left “without man or beast” (32:43, 33:10) is to be planted with both, as a farmer sows a field.

“Watched” is shaqad, the word behind the almond-rod pun at Jeremiah’s call: “I will hasten” (shoqed) and the almond (shaqed) in 1:11–12. The destructive verbs here number five, one more than in 1:10, with “to afflict” added at the end.

Ezekiel 18:2 quotes the same proverb circulating among the exiles. “Set on edge” is qahah, to be blunted or dulled, the word used of an iron blade in Ecclesiastes 10:10: sour fruit leaves the teeth feeling dull and rough.

Deuteronomy 24:16 had laid down that “every man shall be put to death for his own sin”, and King Amaziah applied it when he spared his father’s murderers’ children (2 Kings 14:6). Ezekiel 18:4 says it plainly: “the soul that sinneth, it shall die.”

“New covenant”, berit chadashah, occurs nowhere else in the Old Testament. The phrase passed through the Greek and Latin of the New Testament (Luke 22:20; 2 Corinthians 3:6) into the name “New Testament” itself, testament being the older English word for covenant.

“I was an husband unto them” is ba’alti, I was their master or husband, a word that also sounds the name Baal. The Greek Septuagint read it as “and I disregarded them”, and Hebrews 8:9 quotes that Greek form: “and I regarded them not”.

The first covenant was written on tablets of stone (Exodus 31:18). In 17:1 the sin of Judah was engraved “upon the table of their heart”; the same surface that carried the sin will carry the law. “Inward parts” is qerev, the midst of a person.

“From the least of them unto the greatest” reverses 6:13 and 8:10, where “from the least of them even unto the greatest of them every one is given to covetousness”. The same range of society that was united in greed will be united in knowledge.

“Which divideth the sea when the waves thereof roar; The LORD of hosts is his name” is found almost word for word in Isaiah 51:15. “Ordinances” is chuqqot, statutes, the same word used for laws: the moon and stars keep their statutes exactly.

The fixed order of nature was itself a covenant after the flood: “day and night shall not cease” (Genesis 8:22). The book repeats the argument in 33:20–26, binding the promises to David and to the Levites to the covenant of day and night.

God answered Job with the same impossibility: “Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?... who hath stretched the line upon it?” (Job 38:4–5). In the Greek Septuagint this verse stands before verses 35 and 36.

The tower of Hananeel stood at the north-east of the city; Nehemiah’s builders passed it (Nehemiah 3:1, 12:39) and Zechariah 14:10 uses it as a boundary. The corner gate was at the north-west, where Jehoash of Israel once broke down the wall (2 Kings 14:13).

Neither Gareb nor Goath is named anywhere else in the Bible. The measuring line had been an instrument of demolition: God would stretch over Jerusalem “the line of Samaria” (2 Kings 21:13), and Lamentations 2:8 says “he hath stretched out a line” to destroy. Here it measures for building.

“Ashes” is deshen, the fat ashes of sacrifice, the word of verse 14; the valley of the dead is Hinnom (7:32). “Holy unto the LORD” was the inscription on the gold plate of the high priest’s turban (Exodus 28:36). The horse gate is where Athaliah was put to death (2 Chronicles 23:15).