The new covenant promised in the prophets

If you are Jewish, “new covenant” may sound like a polite way of saying your covenant has been cancelled. You have reason to hear it that way. The Torah calls the Sabbath an everlasting covenant and many of its commands statutes forever (Exodus 31:16-17), and Deuteronomy forbids adding to the commandments or taking from them (Deuteronomy 4:2). For centuries many Christians taught that the church had replaced Israel, and that teaching did real harm to Jewish people. Your suspicion is earned.

Yet the phrase did not start with the church. Berit chadashah, “new covenant,” appears once in the Hebrew Bible, in the words of an Israelite prophet, addressed to Israel by name:

“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;” (Jeremiah 31:31, JPS 1917)

Whatever the promise means, it is made to Israel. This page reads it in Jewish translation and asks what it promised and how Jesus’ first followers, who were Jews, understood it. It does not ask you to accept the New Testament as Scripture.

Jeremiah says the new covenant will not be like the one God made with Israel’s ancestors when he brought them out of Egypt, the covenant “which they broke.” He was writing as Babylon overran Judah, and he saw the exile as the consequence of that breach. The remedy he announces has two parts (Jeremiah 31:31-34).

• The Torah written on the heart. God says, “I will put My law in their inward parts, and in their heart will I write it.” No one will need to teach a neighbor to know the LORD, “for they shall all know Me.”
• Forgiveness that does not need repeating. The promise ends: “I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin will I remember no more.”

Ezekiel, a contemporary in exile, speaks in the same terms: God will give his people a new heart and a new spirit, and says, “I will put My spirit within you,” so that they walk in his statutes (Ezekiel 36:26-27).

The hope is older than either prophet. The Torah commands Israel to circumcise their hearts (Deuteronomy 10:16), and later promises that the LORD himself will circumcise their hearts, so that they love him with all their heart and soul (Deuteronomy 30:6). What the covenant at Sinai required, God promises to supply.

Jeremiah does not promise a new law or a different people. The word he uses is torati, “My law,” the same Torah, and what changes is where it is written: on the heart, and not only on tablets of stone.

Jewish interpreters have generally read the promise as describing the messianic age, when Israel will keep the Torah faithfully and from the heart. That reading takes the text seriously. Christians who read Jeremiah carefully grant its central point: the new covenant does not abolish God’s moral will or set it aside, and it promises people who want to do it.

Where the readings part is over the word “new” and Jeremiah’s contrast with the covenant “which they broke.” If the promise meant only a renewal of Sinai, the prophet would not need to set it against the covenant broken at Sinai. He promises something that covenant did not provide: a forgiveness God will not call to mind again, and a heart changed by God himself. Christians answer that it began with the Messiah; you may answer that it is still to come. Either way, Jeremiah is promising something real to Israel.

Under the covenant at Sinai, forgiveness was bound up with sacrifice. Leviticus sets out offerings for sin, and once a year, on Yom Kippur, the high priest made atonement for the whole people. The sins of each year were remembered and atoned for again the next.

Jeremiah promises a forgiveness after which God will “remember no more.” The prophets also say something about how such forgiveness comes. Daniel looks for a time decreed to make an end of sin and atone for iniquity (Daniel 9:24), and the page on Daniel 9 looks at that passage closely. Isaiah describes a servant who is “wounded because of our transgressions” and who bears the iniquities of many (Isaiah 53:5, 11).

Jesus’ first followers joined these threads. At his last Passover meal, the Gospels record, Jesus took the cup and said, “This cup is the new covenant in My blood, which is poured out for you” (Luke 22:20). Whatever you make of that claim, it shows how early his followers read Jeremiah: as a promise of forgiveness brought about through the death of the Messiah. The servant passages that underlie their reading are set out in Jesus and messianic prophecy.

Jeremiah follows the promise at once with another, that Israel will never be cast off. As long as the sun shines by day and the moon and stars by night, God says, the offspring of Israel will not cease to be a nation before him (Jeremiah 31:35-37).

The earliest Christian writer took the same view. Paul, a Jew, writing to a largely non-Jewish church in Rome, compares Israel to an olive tree and the non-Jewish believers to wild branches grafted into it. He warns them against arrogance toward the natural branches and says that “God’s gifts and His call are irrevocable” (Romans 11:29). On his reading the nations are brought into Israel’s promises; Israel is not pushed out of them.

The church has often failed to live by that. Christians who taught that God was finished with the Jewish people were going against Jeremiah, and against Paul.

None of this shows that Jesus is the Messiah through whom the new covenant comes. That depends on whether God vindicated him, the question taken up in the resurrection as messianic vindication. It does show that the new covenant comes from Israel’s own prophet, so the disagreement between us is over its fulfillment.