Argument

Jeremiah 31 New Covenant Objection Defeater

Intro

Christians call their scriptures the New Testament, which is the same word as New Covenant, and the phrase comes from one place: Jeremiah 31:31.

The objection has two halves and both are correct.

First half. The covenant is promised to Jews. "Behold, the days come, saith the LORD, that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, and with the house of Judah." Not with the Church. Not with the nations. The house of Israel and the house of Judah, named.

Second half. Its terms are unfulfilled. "They shall teach no more every man his neighbour, and every man his brother, saying, Know the LORD: for they shall all know me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them." Nobody needs teaching? Everyone from the least to the greatest knows God? Look around.

Both are conceded here without argument, and a Christian who tries to wriggle out of either has lost the exchange.

What the objection does not mention is the rest of the passage, and the rest of the passage is where the argument is.

Verse 32 says what kind of covenant this will be: "Not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the day that I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt; which my covenant they brake, although I was an husband unto them."

So the prophet says two things about Sinai that the objection's own position cannot absorb. It was broken. And what is coming is not like it.

And verses 35 to 37 guarantee that Israel will never cease to be a nation before God unless the sun and moon depart and the heavens can be measured.

Read whole, the passage defeats hard supersessionism and the sufficiency of Sinai in the same breath. That is why it belongs to both sides of this argument and settles neither by itself.

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Cheatsheet

The 30-second reply:

I concede both your points. The covenant is promised to the house of Israel and the house of Judah, and its conditions are not visibly fulfilled. Now read verse 32 with me. "Not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers... which my covenant they brake." The prophet says the coming covenant is unlike Sinai and that Sinai was broken. That is not my claim about your Scriptures; that is your Scriptures. And read verses 35 to 37, where God swears Israel will not cease to be a nation before him unless the fixed order of sun and moon departs. So this passage rules out the idea that the Church replaced you, and it rules out the idea that Sinai was the last word. Both of us have to live with the whole oracle.

The 6 fast facts:

1. 31:31 names the addressees: the house of Israel and the house of Judah.
2. 31:32 states dissimilarity: lo ka-berit, "not like the covenant."
3. 31:32 states that Sinai was broken, with an emphatic pronoun: asher hemmah heferu, "which they broke."
4. 31:33 internalizes the Torah: "I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts."
5. 31:34 makes forgiveness definitive: "I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more."
6. 31:35-37 guarantees Israel's permanence, which is the passage's own guard against a replacement reading.

The 4 strongest counter-moves:

• "What does verse 32 say about the covenant made at the Exodus?" They broke it. From the prophet.
• "What does lo ka-berit mean?" Not like it. Dissimilarity in kind, stated by the text.
• "Read verses 35 to 37 and tell me whether God is finished with Israel." Concede the anti-supersessionist force out loud. It costs nothing and it is true.
• "If the new covenant has not come, which covenant is Israel in right now?" Sinai, which verse 32 says was broken. Either way the objection pays something.

Concessions to make freely:

• The covenant is promised to Israel and Judah. Conceded in full. Christianity's claim is not transfer but inclusion, on the Abrahamic promise of Genesis 12:3.
• The conditions are unfulfilled. There is no universal knowledge of God and teaching has not ceased. Christianity locates the consummation at the return, which is a claim with a cost.
• Rashi and Radak read chadashah as renewal, and the reading is not absurd, since chadash shares a root with chodesh, the new moon, which is the old moon renewed.
• Leviticus 26:44 says God will not break his covenant with them even in exile, and that verse must be held alongside Jeremiah 31:32. Both are true from their own sides.
• Hard supersessionism is refuted by this passage and Christians who use Jeremiah 31 to argue that the Church replaced Israel are reading half an oracle. See Israel and the Church.
• The passage does not mention Gentiles at all. Nothing in Jeremiah 31 says the nations are brought in. That comes from elsewhere in the prophetic corpus, and pretending it is here is an overreach.
• The unit is the Book of Consolation (Jeremiah 30 to 33), addressed to a people under judgment, and its immediate horizon is return from exile.

What NOT to defend:

• Do not claim the passage mentions the Church. It does not.
• Do not claim the conditions are fulfilled now. They are not.
• Do not use this passage to argue that Israel has been replaced. The oracle forbids it three verses later.
• Do not insist chadashah cannot mean renewed on lexical grounds alone. The argument runs through lo ka-berit, not through the adjective.
• Do not skip verses 35 to 37. Volunteering them is the strongest thing on this page.

The closing line:

"I want to give you something before I ask for anything. Verses 35 to 37 of this chapter say that Israel will cease to be a nation before God when the sun and moon depart and the heavens can be measured, which means never. Any Christian who has told you the Church replaced you was reading half of this oracle. I am reading the other half too. And the other half says the covenant coming is not like the one at Sinai, and that Sinai was broken. Both of those sentences are in your Bible, in the same paragraph, from the same prophet. Whatever we conclude, we have to conclude it from the whole thing."

In full

Defeater for the counter-missionary claim: "Jeremiah 31:31-34 promises a new covenant to the house of Israel and the house of Judah, not to the Church, and its conditions are manifestly unfulfilled. Christianity has appropriated a promise made to Jews and declared it accomplished in defiance of the evidence."

The contrast clause of 31:32, the statement that Sinai was broken, the internalization and definitive-forgiveness language of 31:33-34, the parallel promise in Ezekiel 36, and the perpetuity guarantee of 31:35-37 do not warrant treating the passage as sustaining either the sufficiency of Sinai or the replacement of Israel.

This defeater has an unusual structure. It concedes both of the objection's premises in full and argues that the passage nonetheless says something neither side's slogan captures. It is also the page that most explicitly turns against a Christian error, since hard supersessionism has used this text for centuries and cannot survive it.

The defeat structure is five-pronged.

1. The addressees are conceded, and the Christian claim is inclusion rather than transfer. Jeremiah 31:31 names beit yisrael and beit yehudah. Nothing in the oracle mentions Gentiles. The Christian position is not that the promise was taken from Israel but that Israel's Messiah opened it and Gentiles were brought in afterward, which is the stated purpose of the Abrahamic covenant from Genesis 12:3 ("in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed") and is repeated in the prophets: Isaiah 49:6, "a light to the Gentiles, that thou mayest be my salvation unto the end of the earth"; Isaiah 56:6-8, the foreigners who join themselves to the LORD brought to his holy mountain; Zechariah 8:23. The mechanism of Gentile inclusion is not in Jeremiah 31 and should not be claimed from it.

2. The covenant is expressly unlike Sinai, and Sinai is said to have been broken. Jeremiah 31:32: "Not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the day that I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt; which my covenant they brake, although I was an husband unto them, saith the LORD." Two assertions, and they are the load-bearing ones. Dissimilarity: lo ka-berit, "not like the covenant," a comparative negation. Breach: asher hemmah heferu et beriti, with the emphatic independent pronoun hemmah, "which they, for their part, broke my covenant." A position that requires the Sinai covenant to be intact and final has to account for a verse in which the prophet says the people broke it and that something unlike it is coming.

3. The terms describe a remedy for inability rather than for ignorance. 31:33: "I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts; and will be their God, and they shall be my people." 31:34: "and they shall teach no more every man his neighbour... for they shall all know me... for I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more." The problem being solved is not that Israel lacks the law; Israel has had the law since Sinai. The problem is that having it externally has not produced obedience, which is Jeremiah's complaint throughout the book (Jeremiah 7, Jeremiah 9:13-14, Jeremiah 17:1, "the sin of Judah is written with a pen of iron... graven upon the table of their heart"). The remedy is internal transformation and a definitive forgiveness. Ezekiel 36:25-27 says the same thing in different vocabulary: clean water, a new heart, a new spirit, God's Spirit within, "and cause you to walk in my statutes." Two prophets converge on a promise that Sinai's mechanism did not deliver.

4. The forgiveness clause requires an atonement adequate to it. 31:34: ki eslach la-avonam u-le-chattatam lo ezkor od, "for I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin I will remember no more." The verb salach takes only God as its subject in the Hebrew Bible. The construction "I will not remember again" is the language of a completed and irreversible act, unlike the annual repetition of the Day of Atonement, which by its yearly recurrence marks its own provisionality. Whatever accomplishes this forgiveness must be adequate to a permanent result. See Blood Atonement Not Required Objection Defeater.

5. The passage guards itself against a replacement reading, and Christians must say so. Jeremiah 31:35-37: "Thus saith the LORD, which giveth the sun for a light by day, and the ordinances of the moon and of the stars for a light by night... If those ordinances depart from before me, saith the LORD, then the seed of Israel also shall cease from being a nation before me for ever. Thus saith the LORD; If heaven above can be measured, and the foundations of the earth searched out beneath, I will also cast off all the seed of Israel for all that they have done." This is the immediate continuation of the new-covenant oracle and it is placed there deliberately. A reading on which the Church supersedes Israel is refuted by the verses that follow the text supersessionism quotes. This is the reciprocal concession that makes the rest of the page credible: the Christian using Jeremiah 31 must hand over the anti-supersessionist half before asking anything.

On the unfulfilled conditions, which is the objection's second half and its stronger one. The conditions of 31:34 are not visibly met, and no honest reading pretends otherwise. Christianity claims the covenant inaugurated and not consummated: forgiveness accomplished, internalization begun by the Spirit, universal knowledge of God still ahead. That is the same already-and-not-yet structure at issue across this cluster, and it has to be argued rather than assumed. See Two-Stage Messianic Prophecy and Jesus Failed the Messianic Job Description Objection Defeater. The structure also costs the objection something, which is worth stating: if Jeremiah 31 is entirely future, then the covenant Israel presently stands in is the one 31:32 says was broken.

The defeater is targeted. It does not claim that Jeremiah 31 mentions Gentiles or the Church, that its conditions are presently fulfilled, that chadashah cannot bear a renewal sense, or that Israel has been replaced. It claims that the passage says Sinai was broken, that what is coming is unlike it, and that both the sufficiency-of-Sinai reading and the replacement reading are refuted by the oracle read whole.

Grammar and hermeneutics

The objection is a claim about the addressee and the tense of a Hebrew promise, and several features of the passage bear directly.

• Berit chadashah and the renewal question. Chadash is the ordinary adjective for new: a new house (Deuteronomy 20:5), a new king who knew not Joseph (Exodus 1:8), a new song (Psalm 96:1), new grain (Leviticus 26:10), a new cart (1 Samuel 6:7). Its root is shared with chodesh, the month or new moon, which supports the renewal reading Rashi and Radak adopt, and that connection should be conceded rather than denied. The argument does not rest on the adjective. It rests on 31:32.

• 31:32 is a comparative negation with a causal relative clause. Lo ka-berit asher karati et avotam: the particle ke prefixed to berit makes the statement one of likeness, and lo negates it, so the sense is "not of the same kind as." The relative clause asher hemmah heferu et beriti supplies the reason. The verb hefer is the Hiphil of parar, "to break, annul, frustrate," used of covenant-breaking at Genesis 17:14, Leviticus 26:15, Deuteronomy 31:16, Isaiah 24:5, and Ezekiel 44:7. The independent pronoun hemmah is not required by the syntax and is therefore emphatic: they, for their part, broke it. A renewal reading of chadashah has to sit alongside an explicit statement of dissimilarity in kind, and that is the tension the objection does not address.

• The final clause of 31:32 is itself disputed and should be handled honestly. Ve-anokhi baalti bam is rendered "although I was an husband unto them" in the King James, following the sense of baal as to marry or be master. The Septuagint read something closer to "and I disregarded them," which is what Hebrews 8:9 follows. The Hebrew and Greek traditions diverge here, and a Christian arguing from the Hebrew text should use the Hebrew sense and not import the Greek.

• 31:33's internalization uses spatial and inscriptional language. Natatti et torati be-qirbam ve-al libbam ektavennah, "I will put my law within them, and upon their heart I will write it." The verb katav, to write, deliberately echoes the tablets of Sinai, and the change of writing-surface from stone to heart is the point. Jeremiah 17:1 uses the same inscriptional image negatively: Judah's sin is "graven upon the table of their heart," which sets up 31:33's reversal.

• 31:34's lo ezkor od is a formula of finality. "I will not remember again." Compare Isaiah 43:25, "I, even I, am he that blotteth out thy transgressions for mine own sake, and will not remember thy sins." The verb zakar in the covenantal register means to act on rather than merely to recall, so not-remembering is not forgetting but declining to hold against.

• Genre and unit. Jeremiah 30 to 33 is the Book of Consolation, a block of restoration oracles set inside a book otherwise dominated by judgment. Its immediate horizon is the return from exile, and its promises are addressed to a people being told that judgment is not the end. The unit's own structure requires 31:31-34 and 31:35-37 to be read together, since the second passage functions as the divine guarantee underwriting the first. Separating them produces the two errors this page rejects: taking 31:31-34 alone yields either supersessionism or an appropriated promise, and taking 31:35-37 alone yields a Sinai that was never in question.

On the ordinary force of chadash with its conceded renewal overtone, the comparative negation and emphatic pronoun of 31:32, the inscriptional reversal of 31:33 against 17:1, the finality formula of 31:34, and the placement of the perpetuity oath at 31:35-37, the oracle promises Israel a covenant unlike Sinai while guaranteeing Israel's permanence. Neither half may be dropped.

Argument structure

Master objections to the whole argument

MO1: "The covenant is with Israel and Judah. You have conceded the whole objection in your first premise and then continued talking."

• Three responses. (a) The concession is genuine and is not withdrawn. (b) The objection has two halves and this answers the second. The claim is not merely that the covenant is Israel's but that Sinai therefore remains sufficient, and 31:32 is inconsistent with that. Conceding the addressee does not concede the conclusion. (c) Christianity's structure matches the concession. Gentile inclusion in a covenant made with Israel, on an Abrahamic promise that the nations would be blessed through Israel's seed, is not appropriation; it is the promise reaching its stated end, with the Gentile as the guest. Romans 11:17-24 makes the same point with the olive tree.

MO2: "Chadashah means renewed. Chodesh is the new moon, which is the same moon. Rashi and Radak read renewal, and your whole argument depends on an adjective."

• Three responses. (a) The root connection is real and the renewal reading is conceded as available. (b) The argument does not depend on the adjective, which is why this page rests on 31:32. A renewed covenant that is expressly "not like" the one being renewed is a strange kind of renewal, and the objection has to explain the contrast clause rather than the word. (c) The renewal reading has its own difficulty. If Sinai is renewed rather than replaced, the internalization of 31:33 is unexplained, since Sinai already had the law in written form and the promise is about a different location for it.

MO3: "Leviticus 26:44 says that even in exile God will not abhor them or break his covenant with them. Your reading has God announcing the end of a covenant he swore not to break."

• Three responses. (a) Leviticus 26:44 is the best counter-text and both verses stand. (b) They are statements about different parties. Leviticus 26:44 says God will not break the covenant from his side. Jeremiah 31:32 says Israel broke it from theirs, with an emphatic pronoun making the subject explicit. (c) The combination is precisely what generates the need for a new covenant. A covenant one party has broken and the other refuses to abandon is a situation calling for something of a different kind, which is what 31:31 announces and what 31:35-37 guarantees will not entail Israel's rejection.

MO4: "The conditions are unfulfilled. Nobody stops teaching, nobody knows God universally, sin is plainly still remembered. You cannot claim a covenant is in force when its own description does not match the world."

• Four responses. (a) The observation is correct and is conceded in the concessions. (b) It is the same two-stage structure argued across this cluster and it has to be defended rather than assumed, at Two-Stage Messianic Prophecy. (c) The costs are symmetrical and this should be said. If the covenant is wholly future, Israel presently stands in the covenant 31:32 says was broken. Neither position enjoys a passage whose conditions are all satisfied. (d) One clause admits of a present claim. The forgiveness of 31:34 is stated as a completed divine act rather than as a description of human conditions, and Christianity's claim is located there.

MO5: "Christians have used this passage for seventeen centuries to argue that the Church replaced Israel and that Judaism is obsolete. Hebrews 8:13 says the first covenant is 'ready to vanish away.' Your careful reading is not what your tradition actually did with it."

• Four responses. (a) The historical charge is accurate and should be conceded without defensiveness. This passage has been a principal engine of supersessionist theology and of the contempt that followed from it. (b) The passage forbids what was done with it, and premise 5 is the argument: 31:35-37 immediately follows and guarantees Israel's permanence. A tradition that quoted 31:31-34 and stopped was misusing its own text. (c) Hebrews 8:13 is a New Testament text and cannot function as proof here, and the argument does not use it. (d) The correction is stated in this codex's own frame. Israel and the Church rejects punitive supersessionism explicitly and treats Jewish suffering as never a divine verdict.

MO6: "Ezekiel 36 and Jeremiah 31 are restoration oracles about the return from Babylon. They were fulfilled in the post-exilic period, in the sense any prophetic promise is fulfilled, and reading them eschatologically is a Christian move."

• Three responses. (a) The immediate horizon is the return and that is the right starting point, since the Book of Consolation addresses exiles. (b) The post-exilic community itself did not regard the terms as met. Nehemiah 9 is a corporate confession, delivered after the return, in which the community describes itself as servants in the land God gave their fathers and confesses continuing sin, which is not the situation 31:34 describes. (c) The unfulfilled terms are the objection's own point, made at MO4. An interpreter cannot hold both that the conditions are manifestly unmet and that the oracle was fulfilled in the fifth century BC.

Premise 2, the contrast clause

Affirmative case

1. The negation is comparative. Lo ka-berit, "not like the covenant," with the particle of likeness prefixed.
2. The referent of the comparison is specified. "Which I made with their fathers in the day that I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt." Sinai, named by its historical setting.
3. The breach is asserted with an emphatic pronoun. Asher hemmah heferu et beriti. The independent hemmah is not syntactically required.
4. The verb hefer is the standard term for covenant annulment (Genesis 17:14; Leviticus 26:15; Deuteronomy 31:16; Isaiah 24:5).
5. The clause is the hinge of the oracle, sitting between the announcement in 31:31 and the terms in 31:33-34.

Anticipated objections

1. "'Not like' may mean 'not in the same circumstances' rather than 'not of the same kind.' The comparison could be to the manner of the giving, not to the content."
2. "Israel breaking the covenant does not annul it. The covenant contains provisions for breach, which is what Leviticus 26 is."
3. "You are leaning on an emphatic pronoun. Hebrew uses independent pronouns for many reasons, including simple clarity."

Rebuttals

1. The manner reading is available and it does not help the objection. If the contrast is with the manner of the giving, the new covenant is still given differently, and 31:33 tells you how: on hearts rather than on stone. Either way something changes that the objection needs not to change.
2. This is a good point and it is why premise 2 does not claim annulment. The claim is that the text says Israel broke it, which is inconsistent with the objection's picture of an intact and sufficient Sinai. Leviticus 26 does provide for breach, and its provision is judgment followed by restoration on confession, not a declaration that the covenant was never broken.
3. The pronoun is corroborative, not load-bearing. Independent pronouns do occur for clarity, and the argument stands on lo ka-berit alone. The emphasis is worth noting and should not be pressed as though it were decisive.

Premise 5, the passage guards against supersessionism

Affirmative case

1. 31:35-37 follows immediately on the new-covenant oracle, within the same literary unit.
2. The oath is framed by cosmic order. The giver of sun, moon, and stars stakes Israel's continuance on the fixity of those ordinances.
3. The second oath is unconditional in effect. "If heaven above can be measured... I will also cast off all the seed of Israel for all that they have done." The protasis is impossible; the apodosis therefore never obtains.
4. The phrase "for all that they have done" anticipates the objection. The guarantee is given despite Israel's record, not because of it.
5. The placement is deliberate. A promise of a new covenant immediately followed by a guarantee that the people it is made with will never be cast off is a text arranged to prevent one specific misreading.

Anticipated objections

1. "Christians have ignored these verses for centuries, which shows the passage does not in fact function as a guard."
2. "'Nation before me' may mean ethnic continuance rather than covenantal standing. Israel could persist as a people while ceasing to be God's people."
3. "You are conceding this to buy goodwill. It is a rhetorical move, not a theological commitment."

Rebuttals

1. The historical charge is accurate and it is an indictment of readers, not of the text. A guard that is ignored is still a guard, and pointing that out is part of what this page is for.
2. The second oath closes that route. 31:37 does not speak of nationhood but of casting off: "I will also cast off all the seed of Israel," using ma'as, to reject or despise, which is covenantal rejection language. The two oaths together cover ethnic continuance and covenantal standing.
3. It is a theological commitment stated across this codex, not a concession made for effect. Israel and the Church rejects punitive supersessionism explicitly, refuses any reading of AD 70 as a verdict, and affirms Romans 11:29. The consistency is checkable.

Live-cite kit

Scripture

• Jeremiah 31:31-34, read whole and then 31:35-37 immediately, without pausing between them.
• Jeremiah 31:32 in particular, for lo ka-berit and asher hemmah heferu.
• Jeremiah 17:1, sin graven on the table of the heart, as the negative counterpart to 31:33.
• Ezekiel 36:25-27, the parallel promise.
• Leviticus 26:44, conceded and held alongside.
• Isaiah 43:25, "will not remember thy sins," for the finality formula.
• Genesis 12:3; Isaiah 49:6; Isaiah 56:6-8, on Gentile inclusion, which is not in Jeremiah 31.
• Nehemiah 9, the post-exilic confession, against the fifth-century-fulfillment reading.

Jewish sources

• Rashi and Radak on Jeremiah 31, the renewal reading, cited fairly.

Scholarly

• William Holladay, Jeremiah 2 (Hermeneia, Fortress, 1989); Jack Lundbom, Jeremiah 21-36 (Anchor Bible, Doubleday, 2004).
• J. A. Thompson, The Book of Jeremiah (NICOT, Eerdmans, 1980); Walter Brueggemann, A Commentary on Jeremiah (Eerdmans, 1998).
• R. Kendall Soulen, The God of Israel and Christian Theology (Fortress, 1996), on structural supersessionism.
• Michael L. Brown, Answering Jewish Objections to Jesus, vol. 3 (Baker, 2003).

Aphorism

• "Not like the covenant. Which they broke. Both in one verse."
• "Read three more verses. God swears he will never cast you off."
• "If the new covenant has not come, which one are you in?"

Tactical notes

• Concede both halves of the objection in the first sentence. Addressee and unfulfilled conditions. Anything else sounds like evasion and the concessions are true.
• Then read verse 32 aloud and stop. Do not comment. The contrast clause and the breach clause do their own work.
• Volunteer 31:35-37 before it is needed. Handing over the anti-supersessionist half unprompted is the single most valuable move on this page, and it is what makes a Jewish interlocutor willing to keep talking.
• Name the Christian misuse explicitly. "Christians quoted verses 31 to 34 and stopped, for centuries, and it did enormous harm." Say it in your own tradition's name.
• Concede the renewal reading of chadashah. It costs nothing because the argument is at verse 32.
• Have Leviticus 26:44 ready and answer it with the two-parties distinction, not by minimizing it.
• Deploy the symmetry question gently. "If the new covenant has not come, which covenant is Israel in?" is a real question and it should be asked once, without pressing.
• What NOT to defend: that the passage mentions the Church; that the conditions are met; that chadashah cannot mean renewed; Hebrews 8:13 as evidence in this conversation.

See also

• Israel and the Church, the covenantal frame this page enforces.
• Jews Do Not Need Jesus Objection Defeater, the dual-covenant form of the same dispute.
• Christians Not Under Mosaic Law, the argument on the Mosaic administration.
• Blood Atonement Not Required Objection Defeater, on what 31:34's forgiveness requires.
• Original Sin Is Foreign to Judaism Objection Defeater, on the inability the new heart addresses.
• Jesus Failed the Messianic Job Description Objection Defeater and Two-Stage Messianic Prophecy, on the unfulfilled conditions.
• Oral Torah Is Binding Objection Defeater, on the authority question behind the Sinai reading.
• The Jewish Defense, Judaism, and Counter-Missionary Movement, the cluster hubs.