Jeremiah 31
Jeremiah 31 — Commentary and Meaning
The short answer
Jeremiah 31 reaches its high point in verses 31–34, where God makes an announcement: "I will make a new covenant" with Israel and Judah. It is worth noticing who is speaking. This is not a later religion criticizing an earlier one from the outside. God's own voice, within Israel's own scriptures, says that the old arrangement — the covenant made when God led the people out of Egypt — was broken, and that something new is coming.
So what is actually new about it? Not the partner. God is still speaking to Israel and Judah, the same people bound to God since the exodus. What changes is the location of the law. Instead of commandments written on stone tablets, standing outside the person, God promises, "I will write it" on their hearts. The covenant moves inside. Obedience will no longer be a matter of external instruction alone — "they will all know me," God says, from the least to the greatest.
And the ground of it all is forgiveness: "I will forgive their iniquity." The new covenant does not begin with human improvement; it begins with God choosing to remember sin no more. That mercy is what makes the inward change possible.
Centuries later, the letter to the Hebrews quoted this passage at length to describe what God had done in Jesus. That raises a question readers still wrestle with: does "new" mean the covenant with Israel is discarded? Read carefully, Jeremiah 31 resists that conclusion. The critique of the old way of relating to God was already Israel's own scripture — already God's own word to God's own people — and the promise is addressed to them. The newness is renewal from the inside out, not replacement.
What scholars say
These two excerpts answer complementary questions: Strawn considers whose critique the "new covenant" passage really is — noting that Hebrews depends on Jeremiah 31, whose point was God's own, spoken to Israel within the Old Testament — while Wright examines what changes in a person when God writes the law on the heart.
“In fact, the passage I cited from Hebrews 8:13 follows directly upon a citation of Jeremiah 31:31–34 (see Hebrews 8:8–12). That means that the author of Hebrews depends upon Jeremiah 31 to make his point, but it also means that the author’s point—about an old way of relating to God that is passing away—applies already to Israel, within the Old Testament, which was exactly Jeremiah’s point long before Hebrews was written. And it isn’t just Jeremiah’s point. It’s God’s point, since God is the one talking about “the New Covenant/Testament” in Jeremiah 31. As for the endurance of that covenant with Israel—its liveliness, not its obsolescence—no less an Apostle than Paul said about that covenant that “the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable” (Rom.”
“First, we should have ‘a true heart’. This looks back to the promise in Jeremiah 31.33, quoted in verse 16 above and in 8.10, that God will place his laws in our hearts and write them in our minds. Something happens to people when the new covenant opens up to include them within it – something involving the heart. They become truly human beings, from the inside out. It starts with the heart and works its way into the rest of the personality, thinking, behaviour and all.”
What it means for you
The promise of Jeremiah 31 speaks to anyone who has found that knowing the rules is not the same as being changed by them. You can memorize what is right and still feel that your heart is somewhere else. God's answer here is not a stricter set of instructions but a different kind of work — one that starts inside and moves outward into thinking, habits, and relationships.
It also begins where we often least expect: with forgiveness. Before this passage asks anything of you, it announces what God will do. Real change, in Jeremiah's vision, grows out of being forgiven first.
Jeremiah 31 in context
Jeremiah 31 sits in the section often called the Book of Consolation (chapters 30–33), a stretch of hope in the middle of a book heavy with judgment. Jeremiah spoke to a people facing exile in Babylon, and these chapters promise return, rebuilding, and restored joy — Rachel weeping for her children will be comforted, and the scattered will come home. The new covenant announcement in verses 31–34 is the theological heart of that hope: not just a return to the land, but a renewed relationship between God and the people.
Passages we cover in this chapter