Behold, the days are coming, declares the LORD, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant I made with their fathers when I took them by the hand to lead them out of the land of Egypt—a covenant they broke, though I was a husband to them," declares the LORD. "But this is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the LORD. I will put My law in their minds and inscribe it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they will be My people. No longer will each man teach his neighbor or his brother, saying, 'Know the LORD,' because they will all know Me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the LORD. For I will forgive their iniquities and will remember their sins no more."
These are the words of the covenant that the LORD commanded Moses to make with the Israelites in the land of Moab, in addition to the covenant He had made with them at Horeb. Moses summoned all Israel and proclaimed to them, "You have seen with your own eyes everything the LORD did in Egypt to Pharaoh, to all his officials, and to all his land. You saw with your own eyes the great trials, and those miraculous signs and wonders. Yet to this day the LORD has not given you a mind to understand, eyes to see, or ears to hear.
Significance
Deuteronomy 29:1-4 establishes the Moab covenant with the sobering acknowledgment that "to this day the LORD has not given you a mind to understand, eyes to see, or ears to hear" (לֹא־נָתַן יְהוָה לָכֶם לֵב לָדַעַת, lo-natan YHWH lakhem lev lada'at). Jeremiah 31:31-34 directly addresses this deficiency: the new covenant (בְּרִית חֲדָשָׁה, berit chadashah) will internalize the law — "I will put My law in their minds and inscribe it on their hearts" — and ensure universal knowledge of God — "they will all know Me." Where Deuteronomy diagnoses the old covenant's fatal flaw (no heart to understand), Jeremiah prescribes the remedy (a new heart with internalized Torah). The contrast between external covenant obligations that Israel "broke" (31:32) and internal transformation that ensures covenant faithfulness constitutes the most explicit OT articulation of the old-to-new covenant transition. Jeremiah's own promise supplies the precise wording of that remedy—נָתַתִּי אֶת תּוֹרָתִי בְּקִרְבָּם וְעַל לִבָּם אֶכְתְּבֶנָּה, natatti et torati beqirbam ve'al libbam 'ekhtevenah, "I will put My law in their minds and inscribe it on their hearts"—the very capacity Deuteronomy's diagnosis found wanting.
