Foundation Text

Jeremiah 31:31-34

Context: Jeremiah 31:31-34 stands at the center of the Book of Consolation (Jer 30-33), Jeremiah's collection of restoration oracles delivered against the backdrop of Jerusalem's impending destruction (c. 597-586 BC). To a people about to lose temple, land, and king because "a covenant they broke" (v. 32), God announces "a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah" — the only place in the OT where the phrase "new covenant" (בְּרִית חֲדָשָׁה, bĕrît ḥădāšâ) occurs. The oracle is structured as a series of divine first-person pledges: I will make, I will put My law in their minds, I will be their God, they will all know Me — and it climaxes in the promise that grounds all the others: "For I will forgive (אֶסְלַח, ʾeslaḥ) their iniquities and will remember (אֶזְכָּר, ʾezkār) their sins no more" (v. 34). The "for" (כִּי) is load-bearing: the internalized law and universal knowledge of God are possible because sin has been dealt with finally. For this trajectory the climactic clause is everything: the removal the scapegoat enacted geographically — sins carried to a place where they could not be found — Jeremiah relocates to the divine mind itself. Sin's final destination is not the wilderness but God's covenantal forgetfulness.

Hebrew Key Terms

  • בְּרִית (bĕrît) - "covenant" (v. 31 — qualified as חֲדָשָׁה, "new," only here in the OT)
  • סָלַח (sālaḥ) - "to forgive, pardon" (v. 34 — a verb whose subject in the OT is only ever God; forgiveness is exclusively divine prerogative)
  • זָכַר (zākar) - "to remember" (v. 34, divinely negated: "remember their sins no more" — covenantal non-remembrance, the promise-side terminus of the removal trajectory)
  • עָוֺן (ʿāwôn) - "iniquity, guilt" (v. 34 — the same term the scapegoat carried in Lev 16:22 and Zechariah promised to remove in Zech 3:9)

OT-to-OT Development: Jeremiah's "remember their sins no more" is the covenantal codification of a removal motif the OT had been escalating since Leviticus 16. The scapegoat bore iniquity "into a solitary place" (Lev 16:22) — removal as distance; David sang of transgressions removed "as far as the east is from the west" (Ps 103:12) — removal as immeasurability; Hezekiah testified, "You have cast all my sins behind Your back" (Isa 38:17) — removal from God's own sight. Isaiah 43:25 supplies a verbal antecedent of Jeremiah's promise (the shared zākar and ḥaṭṭāʾt): "I, yes I, am He who blots out your transgressions for My own sake and remembers your sins no more" — a text that makes divine memory the location from which sins are removed, and grounds it purely in God's character ("for My own sake"). Jeremiah takes Isaiah's declaration and binds it into covenant: what Isaiah announced as God's disposition, Jeremiah 31:34 makes God's sworn obligation within the bĕrît ḥădāšâ. Ezekiel 36:25-27 develops the same complex from the cleansing side ("I will also sprinkle clean water on you... I will give you a new heart"), and Micah 7:19 from the disposal side ("cast out all our sins into the depths of the sea") — but only Jeremiah fixes sin-removal as a clause of an unbreakable covenant.

Connections

Christological Connection: In its own context, Jeremiah 31:31-34 diagnoses why the Sinai covenant failed and what only God can do about it. The old covenant was not defective in its law but in its people: "a covenant they broke" (v. 32). So every pledge of the new covenant is unilateral — God will write, God will be, God will forgive, God will not remember. The climactic clause reaches past sin's penalty to sin's record: sālaḥ (forgive) is a verb the OT reserves for God alone, and the negated zākar is not divine amnesia but covenantal resolve — the omniscient God binding Himself never to bring His people's sins into judicial remembrance again. This is the removal trajectory's furthest possible extension: the scapegoat removed sins from the camp; Psalm 103 from any measurable distance; Isaiah 38 from God's sight; Jeremiah 31 removes them from God's covenantal memory. Yet Jeremiah leaves the mechanism unstated — the oracle promises the result of a final dealing with sin without naming the sacrifice that secures it, while the Day of Atonement kept running its annual "reminder of sins" (Heb 10:3) in the opposite direction.

Jesus names the mechanism on the night He was betrayed: "This cup is the new covenant in My blood, which is poured out for you" (Luke 22:20). The new covenant is not inaugurated by a better Israel but by a better sacrifice. Hebrews quotes Jeremiah 31:31-34 in full — the longest OT quotation in the NT (Hebrews 8:8-12) — and then returns to its final clause as the capstone of its whole argument: "Then He adds: 'Their sins and lawless acts I will remember no more.' And where these have been forgiven, an offering for sin is no longer needed" (Hebrews 10:17-18). The logic is the trajectory's QED: God can righteously "remember no more" because Christ was "offered once to bear the sins of many" (Hebrews 9:28) — the true scapegoat carrying iniquity not into geographic remoteness but into divine forgetfulness. The escalation is from symbol to substance: the goat's wilderness could only picture irretrievability; the blood of the covenant accomplishes it, so completely that the entire sacrificial system closes for lack of anything left to atone.

Already/not yet: the new covenant is in force now — believers' sins are presently forgiven and covenantally un-remembered, which is why "there is now no condemnation" (Romans 8:1) — yet its promises are still being universalized. "They will all know Me" awaits the consummation, when the covenant people see Him face to face and the removal of sins issues in a creation where "nothing unclean will ever enter it" (Revelation 21:27). Between the cross and that day, the believer's recurring guilt meets God's unrecurring memory: He has chosen, in covenant, not to remember what Christ has carried away.

Connection Method(s): Promise-Fulfillment (primary) — Jeremiah 31:31-34 is verbal prophecy in the strictest sense: a spoken divine pledge ("the days are coming, declares the LORD") that the NT declares fulfilled by direct citation — Jesus' institution of "the new covenant in My blood" (Luke 22:20; 1 Cor 11:25) and Hebrews' double quotation (Heb 8:8-12; 10:16-17). ANTI-DEFAULT CHECK: this text is not a type — it is not an institution or event prefiguring Christ but a promise awaiting Him; the typological freight in this trajectory is carried by Leviticus 16, while Jeremiah 31 supplies the promissory anchor that the scapegoat's removal would become God's covenanted forgetfulness. Longitudinal Theme (secondary) — verse 34 is the terminus of the canon-wide sin-removal motif: carried away (Lev 16:22) → immeasurably distant (Ps 103:12) → behind God's back (Isa 38:17) → blotted out and unremembered (Isa 43:25) → covenantally remembered no more (Jer 31:34) → "an offering for sin is no longer needed" (Heb 10:18). Contrast (subordinate) — the oracle works partly by negation: "not be like the covenant I made with their fathers" (v. 32); the old covenant's annual reminder of sins (Heb 10:3) is answered by the new covenant's permanent non-remembrance.

Trajectory Table: 141 - Scapegoat (Removal of Sins)

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