“They shall all know me, from the least of them unto the greatest” (Jeremiah 31:34). An artistic visualization of the covenant promise among a covenant family today.
October 26–November 1, 2026 · CFM-08 · Jeremiah 30–52 and Lamentations
Jeremiah 30–52 and Lamentations: the book turns from tearing down to building and planting, and the Lord promises that every one of us, from the least to the greatest, can know Him.
The army of Babylon had Jerusalem surrounded. Siege ramps were going up against the walls. Inside the city, Jeremiah was locked in the court of the prison, put there by the king of Judah for saying the city would fall (32:2).
Then his cousin Hanameel came to the prison with an offer: "Buy my field, I pray thee, that is in Anathoth" (32:8).
It’s the worst real estate deal in the Bible. The land is about to be occupied by an enemy army. The buyer is in jail. And the field is in Anathoth, Jeremiah’s hometown, where the men had once plotted to kill him (11:21).
Jeremiah bought it. "I bought the field… and weighed him the money, even seventeen shekels of silver" (32:9). He signed the deed, had it witnessed, and sealed it. Then he told his scribe Baruch to put both copies, sealed and open, "in an earthen vessel, that they may continue many days" (32:14).
Then he explained why:
"For thus saith the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel; Houses and fields and vineyards shall be possessed again in this land." (32:15)
Last week the book tore down. This week it builds and plants, and it starts with a man buying a field he’ll never farm, from a cell, because God told him the people would come home.
This week in the manual
- The Lord will bring His covenant people out of captivity — Jeremiah 31; 33
- "They shall be my people, and I will be their God" — 31:31–34; 32:37–42
- The scriptures have power to turn me away from evil — 36
- Be firm in following God’s prophets — 37:1–3, 15–21; 38:1–6, 14–28; 39
- I can be bold in standing up for what is right — 38:6–13; 39:15–18
- The Lord can relieve the sorrow I experience because of sin — Lamentations 1; 3
The manual gives us seven chapters of Jeremiah this week, 31–33 and 36–39, plus Lamentations 1 and 3. We’ll read all twenty-three chapters from the turn to the end, and all five chapters of Lamentations.
One more thing before we start. This isn’t a history lesson. Nephi taught us how to read: "I did liken all scriptures unto us, that it might be for our profit and learning" (1 Nephi 19:23). Jeremiah wrote to Judah and Jerusalem, the Lord’s covenant people and the city where His house stood. In the latter days, we read that pair as ours: the Lord’s covenant people today, and the place where His house stands. Even the land looks like it. In December 1958, National Geographic ran "Geographical Twins a World Apart": a freshwater lake, a Jordan River running down to a salt sea, there and here. Read this week as a prophecy about us.
"Write it in a book"
Chapter 30 is where Jeremiah’s book turns:
"Write thee all the words that I have spoken unto thee in a book. For, lo, the days come, saith the LORD, that I will bring again the captivity of my people Israel and Judah." (30:2–3)
The Church’s own Scripture Helps note that Jeremiah 30–31 is "sometimes called the ‘book of consolation.’" And look how the consolation starts:
"Therefore fear thou not, O my servant Jacob, saith the LORD; neither be dismayed, O Israel." (30:10)
That’s Isaiah’s line. "Fear not, O Jacob, my servant" (Isaiah 44:2). Isaiah turns from Babylon to comfort at chapter 40. Jeremiah turns at chapter 30, and he does it in Isaiah’s own words.
Notice the pair, too: Jacob and Israel, in one breath. That’s how Isaiah names the covenant people, and Jeremiah keeps the pairing. (Jacob/Israel is one of three pairs, with Zion/Jerusalem and Babylon/Chaldea, that Avraham Gileadi lays out as rungs on Isaiah’s ladder in his book Isaiah Decoded; the credit is his. More at 51:35 below.)
Then chapter 31 takes the words of Jeremiah’s call from chapter 1 and turns them around:
"…like as I have watched over them, to pluck up, and to break down, and to throw down, and to destroy, and to afflict; so will I watch over them, to build, and to plant, saith the LORD." (31:28)
The same God who watched over the tearing down watches over the building. He never stopped watching.
One more promise from chapter 30, for anyone who read Isaiah 58 with us two weeks ago: "I will restore health unto thee, and I will heal thee of thy wounds" (30:17). The Hebrew word for "health" is the same one Isaiah used, the new flesh that grows back over a wound. The wound closes.
David their king, in the latter days
In the middle of the book of hope, Jeremiah repeats the promise from last week:
"But they shall serve the LORD their God, and David their king, whom I will raise up unto them." (30:9)
And chapter 30 closes the same way chapter 23 did: "in the latter days ye shall consider it" (30:24).
Chapter 33 says it again: "I will cause the Branch of righteousness to grow up unto David" (33:15). And it puts the promise on the same footing as sunrise: if you can break "my covenant of the day, and my covenant of the night," then "may also my covenant be broken with David my servant" (33:20–21).
The verse between them names who comes home with the Branch: "In those days shall Judah be saved, and Jerusalem shall dwell safely" (33:16). Last week that same pair stood accused: "A conspiracy is found among the men of Judah, and among the inhabitants of Jerusalem" (11:9). The pair Jeremiah accused is the pair the Lord saves. And if Judah and Jerusalem name us, that promise has our address on it.
The scriptures promise a servant from David’s line in the latter days. We say that plainly. Who he is, the Lord keeps "in the shadow of his hand" (Isaiah 49:2). And the King he serves is the LORD.
John the Baptist prepared the way for the first coming, and "they knew him not, but have done unto him whatsoever they listed" (Matthew 17:12). They beheaded the forerunner and crucified the Lord. President Brigham Young said the Gentiles would be "as much mistaken in regard to his second advent as the Jews were in relation to the first" (Journal of Discourses 8:115). The servant who comes before the second coming will be just as easy to miss, and they’ll run the same play on him. But the Lord has said how it ends: "he shall be marred because of them. Yet I will heal him" (3 Nephi 21:10).
(The full case is its own article: Jeremiah Promised David "a Righteous Branch." Zechariah Called the Branch "My Servant.")
Rachel weeping, and Ephraim’s prayer
"A voice was heard in Ramah, lamentation, and bitter weeping; Rahel weeping for her children refused to be comforted for her children, because they were not." (31:15)
Rachel was the mother of Joseph and Benjamin, so Jeremiah pictures her weeping over her lost children, the scattered tribes. Matthew heard the same voice again when Herod killed the children of Bethlehem (Matthew 2:17–18).
Look how exact it is. Rachel died giving birth to a son "in the way to Ephrath, which is Beth-lehem" (Genesis 35:18–19). And Ramah is where Babylon chained the captives before marching them away. Jeremiah himself was there, "bound in chains among all that were carried away captive of Jerusalem and Judah" (Jeremiah 40:1).
It’s a pattern, and it runs the length of scripture. Pharaoh ordered, "Every son that is born ye shall cast into the river" (Exodus 1:22), and God hid Moses. Herod killed Bethlehem’s sons, and an angel sent Joseph to Egypt with the Child (Matthew 2:13). We read a pattern there: when the adversary goes after the children, a deliverer is coming. And the tyrant’s house ends in the weeping he caused: "there was a great cry in Egypt" (Exodus 12:30).
Michael Card set this scene to music in "Spirit of the Age" (The Final Word, 1987). He hears Rachel’s weeping on every page of history, children offered up to whatever the age worships, and he ends with the promise that the Child from the manger will crush the serpent (Genesis 3:15). The Restoration adds what a weeping mother most needs to hear: "all children who die before they arrive at the years of accountability are saved in the celestial kingdom of heaven" (D&C 137:10). (The full story of Tophet and the children is its own article: Judah Burned Its Children in the Valley of Hinnom. Jesus Used That Valley’s Name for Hell.)
But Jeremiah doesn’t leave her weeping:
"Refrain thy voice from weeping, and thine eyes from tears: for thy work shall be rewarded… And there is hope in thine end, saith the LORD, that thy children shall come again to their own border." (31:16–17)
Then comes a prayer. Remember it, because you’ll hear it again at the very end of this lesson:
"I have surely heard Ephraim bemoaning himself thus… turn thou me, and I shall be turned; for thou art the LORD my God." (31:18)
Ephraim doesn’t say I’ll turn myself around. He says you turn me, and I’ll be turned. And the Lord answers him right there in the text:
"Is Ephraim my dear son? is he a pleasant child?… my bowels are troubled for him; I will surely have mercy upon him, saith the LORD." (31:20)
The Lord calls Ephraim "my firstborn" (31:9) and promises, "I will turn their mourning into joy" (31:13). That’s the line the manual chose for this week’s title.
A great company from the north
Chapter 31 also tells us where they come from, and who welcomes them:
"For there shall be a day, that the watchmen upon the mount Ephraim shall cry, Arise ye, and let us go up to Zion unto the LORD our God." (31:6)
"Behold, I will bring them from the north country, and gather them from the coasts of the earth… a great company shall return thither." (31:8)
Remember the call in chapter 3: "proclaim these words toward the north… Return, thou backsliding Israel" (3:12). Here they come.
The Lord told the Prophet Joseph Smith the same story: "they who are in the north countries shall come in remembrance before the Lord," and "there shall they fall down and be crowned with glory, even in Zion, by the hands of the servants of the Lord, even the children of Ephraim" (D&C 133:26, 32). In Jeremiah, Ephraim’s watchmen call them to Zion. In the Doctrine and Covenants, Ephraim crowns them there. And Moses gave Joseph the keys of "the leading of the ten tribes from the land of the north" (D&C 110:11).
Joseph Smith knew these verses before he translated a single page. When the angel Moroni came to him in September 1823, Oliver Cowdery later wrote, these were among the scriptures the angel quoted: Ephraim’s watchmen (31:6), the great company from the north (31:8), Ephraim the firstborn (31:9), the new covenant (31:31–33), and the children of Israel and Judah asking “the way to Zion” (50:4–5). The chapters we’re reading this week were part of the Prophet’s first lesson.
And who are Ephraim’s children now? Jacob promised that Ephraim’s seed would "become a multitude of nations" (Genesis 48:19). In Hebrew the phrase reads, literally, "the fulness of the Gentiles." Ephraim was scattered into the nations until his children were Gentiles. So the Lord could tell the early Saints they were "lawful heirs, according to the flesh" (D&C 86:9), while the Prophet Joseph prayed in the Kirtland Temple for a people "identified with the Gentiles" (D&C 109:60). Read together, they say we’re Israel by lineage and Gentile by nation. (That story is its own article: Joseph Was Sent Into Egypt to Save His Brothers. Moroni Says It Was a Type of What God Would Do in America.)
The new covenant: "They shall all know me"
This is the summit of the whole book:
"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… 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. And 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, saith the LORD: for I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more." (31:31, 33–34)
Last week we followed one question through twenty-nine chapters: do you know Him?
- "Let him that glorieth glory in this, that he understandeth and knoweth me" (9:24)
- "Was not this to know me?" (22:16)
- "I will give them an heart to know me" (24:7)
Here’s the answer: "They shall all know me." Not some of them. Not just the priests or the prophets. From the least to the greatest.
The old covenant was written on stone. This one is written on the heart. And notice what goes away: "they shall teach no more every man his neighbour… saying, Know the LORD." Nobody has to tell you about Him, because you know Him.
Isaiah promised it first: "all thy children shall be taught of the LORD" (Isaiah 54:13). Jesus quoted it: "It is written in the prophets, And they shall be all taught of God" (John 6:45). And He defined eternal life by it: "that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent" (John 17:3).
Last week ended with a warning from Elder David A. Bednar: "We should not expect the Church as an organization to teach or tell us everything." This is why. The new covenant was never meant to run on borrowed knowledge. The Church gives us the authority, the ordinances, the covenants, and the scriptures, things no one can get on their own. But the knowing is personal. In Elder Bednar’s words, "Our personal responsibility is to learn what we should learn, to live as we know we should live, and to become who the Master would have us become."
Last week the captives searched with all their heart (29:13). This week, the promise lands: they shall all know Me.
(Our full article on Elder David A. Bednar and Jeremiah, The Church Was Never Meant to Carry You, goes deeper.)
"Call unto me"
Chapter 33 opens with Jeremiah still in prison (33:1), and the Lord gives him an open invitation:
"Call unto me, and I will answer thee, and shew thee great and mighty things, which thou knowest not." (33:3)
Back in chapter 32, after he’d signed the deed, Jeremiah prayed: "Ah Lord GOD!… there is nothing too hard for thee" (32:17). The Lord answered with his own words turned into a question: "Behold, I am the LORD, the God of all flesh: is there any thing too hard for me?" (32:27). It’s the same question the Lord asked Abraham about Sarah (Genesis 18:14). That one ended with a baby. This one ends with a people coming home.
And then the most tender line in the book. Last week, the Lord asked us to search for Him "with all your heart" (29:13). This week He tells us how He’ll bring us home:
"I will plant them in this land assuredly with my whole heart and with my whole soul." (32:41)
It’s the only time in Jeremiah the Lord says "my whole heart." We search for Him with our whole heart. He plants us with His.
The call comes first
Notice the order in 33:3: call, then I will answer. The call comes first. The answer follows.
Isaiah shows the same order on a larger scale. Zion cries out first: "Awake, awake, put on strength, O arm of the LORD" (Isaiah 51:9). The Lord answers her in her own words: "Awake, awake; put on thy strength, O Zion" (52:1). Then: "The LORD hath made bare his holy arm in the eyes of all the nations" (52:10). The Lord explained Zion’s strength in a revelation to Joseph: "to put on her strength is to put on the authority of the priesthood" (D&C 113:8). We read it this way: Zion’s faith comes first, and the arm moves because she prays.
From another prison, Liberty Jail, Joseph wrote the same order: "let us cheerfully do all things that lie in our power; and then may we stand still, with the utmost assurance, to see the salvation of God, and for his arm to be revealed" (D&C 123:17). Jeremiah in his prison and Joseph in his learned the same thing: we call, we do our part, and then He moves. (Isaiah’s full sequence is its own study, coming soon: the arm, the two sons sent to Jerusalem, Jacob 5’s last servant who calls the others one last time, and Zion’s 144,000.)
The covenant they broke in the temple
The manual skips chapter 34. Don’t.
With Babylon at the gates, King Zedekiah and the leaders made a covenant to "proclaim liberty" and set their Hebrew slaves free (34:8–9). They did it. And then, when the pressure seemed to ease, "they turned, and caused the servants and the handmaids, whom they had let go free, to return" (34:11).
Where had they made that covenant? The Lord says it: "ye had made a covenant before me in the house which is called by my name" (34:15).
That’s the same phrase from the temple sermon in chapter 7: "this house, which is called by my name." They made a covenant in the temple and broke it as soon as it cost them something.
The Lord’s answer is one of the most chilling lines in scripture:
"Ye have not hearkened unto me, in proclaiming liberty… behold, I proclaim a liberty for you, saith the LORD, to the sword, to the pestilence, and to the famine." (34:17)
They wouldn’t give liberty, so the Lord gave them theirs: the freedom to face what was coming without Him. Two weeks ago, Isaiah 58 called us "to let the oppressed go free." Jeremiah 34 shows what happens when a people says yes to that in the temple and then takes it back.
Chapter 35 holds up the contrast: the Rechabites, a family that kept their father’s command never to drink wine for generations. "Unto this day they drink none, but obey their father’s commandment: notwithstanding I have spoken unto you… but ye hearkened not unto me" (35:14). A family kept a man’s word. Judah wouldn’t keep God’s.
The scroll a king cut up and burned
Chapter 36 happened on a fast day. The people had "proclaimed a fast before the LORD" (36:9), and Jeremiah sent Baruch to the temple to read the Lord’s words aloud "upon the fasting day" (36:6).
The words reached the king. He was sitting by a fire in his winter house. As Jehudi read the scroll aloud, every three or four leaves were cut off with a penknife and thrown in the fire, "until all the roll was consumed" (36:22–23).
The Lord’s response was simple: "Take thee again another roll, and write in it all the former words" (36:28). Jeremiah dictated it again, and "there were added besides unto them many like words" (36:32).
You can burn a scroll. You can’t burn the word. The king who tried ended up with a longer book.
This lesson is taught on fast Sunday. Baruch read the scroll on a fast day, and the Lord’s word was the thing they needed to hear. On your fast day, open the book.
"Is there any word from the LORD?"
Chapters 37 and 38 are the manual’s center this week: be firm in following God’s prophets.
The princes beat Jeremiah and threw him in a makeshift prison (37:15). And then King Zedekiah, the last king of Judah, sent for him in secret:
"The king asked him secretly in his house, and said, Is there any word from the LORD? And Jeremiah said, There is: for, said he, thou shalt be delivered into the hand of the king of Babylon." (37:17)
Zedekiah asked. He just didn’t want the answer.
Then the princes came to the king and demanded Jeremiah’s death (38:4). And Zedekiah said something that tells you who really ran Jerusalem: "Behold, he is in your hand: for the king is not he that can do any thing against you" (38:5).
So they lowered Jeremiah into a cistern. "And in the dungeon there was no water, but mire: so Jeremiah sunk in the mire" (38:6).
Remember chapter 2? The people had "hewed them out cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water" (2:13). Now they throw the Lord’s prophet into one. A cistern with no water, just mud. The Scripture Helps say it straight: the leaders put him there "intending for him to die there."
Nephi knew this. Writing in the wilderness, he said of Jerusalem: "they have rejected the prophets, and Jeremiah have they cast into prison" (1 Nephi 7:14).
The outsider who pulled him out
Who saved Jeremiah? Not a priest. Not a prince. Ebed-melech, an Ethiopian, a foreigner, a servant in the king’s house.
He went to the king and said it plainly: "these men have done evil in all that they have done to Jeremiah the prophet" (38:9). The king gave him thirty men. And then Ebed-melech did something you only do if you’ve thought about the person at the bottom of the pit. He gathered "old cast clouts and old rotten rags," let them down on ropes, and told Jeremiah to put them under his arms so the ropes wouldn’t cut him (38:11–12).
Brave, and kind. That’s the manual’s point this week, and it’s a good one: you can be bold in standing up for what’s right.
When the city fell, the Lord sent a personal message to Ebed-melech: "I will surely deliver thee… because thou hast put thy trust in me, saith the LORD" (39:18).
Remember chapter 17? "Blessed is the man that trusteth in the LORD." Ebed-melech was that man.
Zedekiah and Lehi
The manual sets two men side by side this week, and it’s the right pair.
Zedekiah heard the word of the Lord and asked for it again and again. Jeremiah pleaded with him: "Obey, I beseech thee, the voice of the LORD… so it shall be well unto thee, and thy soul shall live" (38:20). He didn’t. When the city fell, the king of Babylon "slew the sons of Zedekiah in Riblah before his eyes," then "put out Zedekiah’s eyes" and carried him to Babylon in chains (39:6–7).
Lehi heard the same message in the same city in the same years. He believed it, obeyed it, and left. Years later, in the promised land, he told his sons what he had seen: "I have seen a vision, in which I know that Jerusalem is destroyed; and had we remained in Jerusalem we should also have perished" (2 Nephi 1:4).
And here the Book of Mormon tells us something Jeremiah doesn’t. Jeremiah 52 says Zedekiah’s sons were killed (52:10). The prophet Nephi, son of Helaman, asked his people: "Will ye say that the sons of Zedekiah were not slain, all except it were Mulek? Yea, and do ye not behold that the seed of Zedekiah are with us" (Helaman 8:21).
One son survived. Mulek escaped, crossed the sea, and his people became the people of Zarahemla (Omni 1:15; Mosiah 25:2). The Church’s own Scripture Helps point to it. The Book of Mormon finishes a story Jeremiah couldn’t.
Not by chance
In October 2024, Elder David A. Bednar built a general conference talk on a teaching of President Ezra Taft Benson: "The Nephites never had the book; neither did the Lamanites of ancient times. It was meant for us."
Now look at where that book begins. Not in America. In Jeremiah’s Jerusalem, "in the commencement of the first year of the reign of Zedekiah" (1 Nephi 1:4), the very years of this week’s chapters. Lehi heard the warning Jeremiah was preaching. Nephi recorded that Jerusalem had "cast into prison" Jeremiah (1 Nephi 7:14). Their brass plates carried "many prophecies which have been spoken by the mouth of Jeremiah" (1 Nephi 5:13). Whether Lehi ever sat at Jeremiah’s feet, the text doesn’t say. But the line is plain: from Jeremiah’s Jerusalem, to Lehi’s family, to Mormon’s abridgment, to us.
And the Lord brought two houses out of that Jerusalem to this land. Lehi, of Joseph through Manasseh (Alma 10:3). And Mulek, Zedekiah’s son, of Judah and David’s line. In the land of Zarahemla, "the people of Zarahemla, and of Mosiah, did unite together" (Omni 1:19). Joseph and Judah, joined on this land, a type of the way Ezekiel saw the two sticks become one (Ezekiel 37:19).
The book written for us starts in the city Jeremiah warned. So does this week.
After the fall: "Go ye not into Egypt"
The manual stops at chapter 39. The story doesn’t.
Babylon appointed a governor over the people left behind: Gedaliah, the son of Ahikam, the son of Shaphan (40:5). That’s the family whose hand protected Jeremiah back in chapter 26. Ishmael, a man "of the seed royal," came to Gedaliah with ten men, sat and ate bread with him, and murdered him (41:1–2).
Afraid of Babylon’s revenge, the survivors came to Jeremiah and asked him to pray for direction. They promised to obey whatever the Lord said. The Lord answered in the words of Jeremiah’s call one more time:
"If ye will still abide in this land, then will I build you, and not pull you down, and I will plant you, and not pluck you up." (42:10)
And plainly: "Go ye not into Egypt" (42:19).
They went to Egypt anyway. "Thou speakest falsely: the LORD our God hath not sent thee" (43:2). And they took Jeremiah and Baruch with them (43:6–7).
In Egypt, the people told Jeremiah why they weren’t going to listen. When they used to burn incense to the queen of heaven, "then had we plenty of victuals, and were well, and saw no evil. But since we left off… we have wanted all things" (44:17–18). They measured the truth by how well things were going.
If you’ve read Isaiah with us, you know we read Egypt in Isaiah as America: the strong nation the covenant people lean on for safety instead of the Lord. Read 42–44 with that in mind.
And to Baruch, his faithful scribe, the Lord gave one short chapter: "Seekest thou great things for thyself? seek them not… but thy life will I give unto thee for a prey in all places whither thou goest" (45:5).
Babylon falls
Chapters 46–51 turn to the nations: Egypt, the Philistines, Moab, Ammon, Edom, Damascus, Elam. Then Babylon itself. The manual doesn’t touch these chapters. Don’t skip them: this is where Isaiah’s code comes back the strongest.
Inside the oracle on Egypt, the Lord repeats His promise from chapter 30 nearly word for word: "But fear not thou, O my servant Jacob" (46:27).
Inside the oracle on Babylon, the gathering:
"The children of Israel shall come, they and the children of Judah together, going and weeping: they shall go, and seek the LORD their God. They shall ask the way to Zion with their faces thitherward." (50:4–5)
Jeremiah heads the whole prophecy with Isaiah’s pair: "against Babylon and against the land of the Chaldeans" (50:1). And the command to leave is Isaiah’s, nearly word for word:
"Remove out of the midst of Babylon, and go forth out of the land of the Chaldeans." (50:8)
Isaiah said it first: "Go ye forth of Babylon, flee ye from the Chaldeans" (Isaiah 48:20). Jeremiah says it again a chapter later: "Flee out of the midst of Babylon, and deliver every man his soul" (51:6). The Lord said it a third time, to us: "Go ye out from Babylon. Be ye clean that bear the vessels of the Lord" (D&C 133:5), "from the midst of wickedness, which is spiritual Babylon" (133:14).
Jeremiah’s Babylon chapters also hold a one-of-a-kind verse:
"The violence done to me and to my flesh be upon Babylon, shall the inhabitant of Zion say; and my blood upon the inhabitants of Chaldea, shall Jerusalem say." (51:35)
If you’ve studied Isaiah with us, you know how we read his paired names: Zion and Jerusalem are the Lord’s people at their best; Babylon and Chaldea are the world. This is the only verse in all the standard works where both pairs appear, and they stand on opposite sides. In the end it comes down to Zion against Babylon. If Jerusalem is ours, so is the question of which side of that verse we’ll stand on.
Reading Babylon/Chaldea, Jacob/Israel and Zion/Jerusalem as levels on a ladder to heaven comes from Avraham Gileadi’s ladder framework in his flagship book, Isaiah Decoded: Ascending the Ladder to Heaven. It is the decoder ring itself, the codex for Isaiah. I’ve received many witnesses about Isaiah, but the most powerful came when I asked my Father in Heaven whether the patterns this magnificent book lays out, complex as they are, are true and real. I’m happy to report that they are. Our research adds "Briars and Thorns" as a separate rung of its own.
(Babylon has an army from the north coming for her too, and it isn’t the one that came for Jerusalem. Isaiah’s pairs, and the two armies from the north, are their own article: Isaiah Named God’s People in Pairs. Jeremiah Kept His Code.)
Then Jeremiah had the whole Babylon prophecy carried to Babylon, read aloud, tied to a stone, and thrown into the Euphrates: "Thus shall Babylon sink, and shall not rise" (51:63–64). And the next line: "Thus far are the words of Jeremiah."
The last page: a king lifted out of prison
Chapter 52 retells the fall. And then, on the very last page, something no one expected.
Thirty-seven years into his captivity, King Jehoiachin, the same king called Coniah in chapter 22, the signet ring the Lord said He would pull off His hand, was brought out of prison. The new king of Babylon "spake kindly unto him, and set his throne above the throne of the kings that were with him in Babylon, and changed his prison garments" (52:31–33).
The book of Jeremiah ends with David’s heir lifted out of prison and given new clothes.
And that’s not the end of his line. His grandson Zerubbabel (Matthew 1:12) laid the foundation of the rebuilt temple and finished it (Zechariah 4:9), and he received this word from the Lord: "I will take thee, O Zerubbabel, my servant… and will make thee as a signet" (Haggai 2:23). The signet that was pulled off was put back on.
Lamentations: a lament with no answer, and the prayer that has one
Lamentations is the funeral song for Jerusalem.
"How doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people! how is she become as a widow!" (Lamentations 1:1)
"Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by? behold, and see if there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow." (1:12)
Four of its five chapters are acrostics. Each verse, or set of verses, starts with the next letter of the Hebrew alphabet. Grief, from A to Z. The Scripture Helps point out something striking: "Lamentations does not contain any responses from the Lord." It’s all the people talking. The Lord never speaks into the ruins. Only once does a voice from a pit remember that He did: "Thou drewest near in the day that I called upon thee: thou saidst, Fear not" (3:57).
Chapter 2 asks the book’s hardest question, and asks it in Isaiah’s pair:
"What thing shall I take to witness for thee? what thing shall I liken to thee, O daughter of Jerusalem? what shall I equal to thee, that I may comfort thee, O virgin daughter of Zion? for thy breach is great like the sea: who can heal thee?" (2:13)
Zion and Jerusalem, side by side, and no one to heal them. But Jeremiah had already answered: "I will restore health unto thee, and I will heal thee of thy wounds" (Jeremiah 30:17).
And Lamentations tells us how the den of robbers ended:
"For the sins of her prophets, and the iniquities of her priests, that have shed the blood of the just in the midst of her." (4:13)
The prophets and priests who said "Thou shalt surely die" in chapter 26 are named in the ruins.
But in the middle chapter of the book, the longest one, a single voice remembers:
"This I recall to my mind, therefore have I hope. It is of the LORD’s mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness." (3:21–23)
"For the Lord will not cast off for ever: But though he cause grief, yet will he have compassion according to the multitude of his mercies." (3:31–32)
And then the last prayer in the book:
"Turn thou us unto thee, O LORD, and we shall be turned; renew our days as of old." (5:21)
You’ve heard that prayer before. It’s Ephraim’s prayer from Jeremiah 31:18: "turn thou me, and I shall be turned." In Hebrew it’s the same two words, turn me and I shall be turned.
Lamentations prays it and gets no answer inside its own pages. But Jeremiah 31 already gave the answer: "I will surely have mercy upon him, saith the LORD" (31:20).
The answer to Lamentations is in the book of hope.
(The whole book of Lamentations, and how Isaiah answered its question first, is its own article: Lamentations Ends With a Question It Never Answers. Isaiah Had Already Answered It.)
Where this lands
Twenty-three chapters and five laments, and every one of them is about building and planting:
- A field bought from a prison cell, because the people would come home.
- A new covenant, written on the heart, so that "they shall all know me."
- A scroll burned and written again, longer.
- A prophet pulled out of the mud by a foreigner who trusted the Lord.
- A king lifted out of prison and given new clothes.
- And a prayer, turn us and we shall be turned, that the Lord had already answered.
Last week asked: do you trust the house, or do you know the Lord of the house? This week gives the promise: you can know Him. Not secondhand. Written on your heart.
I know the Lord turns people. I’ve asked Him to turn me, more than once, and He has. I know He writes on hearts, not just on stone, and I know the knowing is for every one of us, from the least to the greatest. And I know He plants His people with His whole heart, and that He brings them home to His Father…. how I long for that home.
This Sunday is fast Sunday. Before it, try three things:
- Read Jeremiah 31:31–34 before you fast. Ask Him to write one thing on your heart.
- Open the book on your fast day, the way Baruch did. Read one chapter of Jeremiah you’ve never read.
- Pray Ephraim’s prayer: "Turn thou me, and I shall be turned." Then watch for the answer.
"For they shall all know me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them, saith the LORD." — Jeremiah 31:34
Search. Not read.
Next week
Ezekiel. Jeremiah’s younger contemporary, already a captive in Babylon. He saw the glory of the Lord leave the temple, and a man in linen go through Jerusalem marking the foreheads of everyone who "sigh and that cry for all the abominations that be done in the midst thereof" (Ezekiel 9:4).
And he picked up Jeremiah’s new covenant exactly where Jeremiah left it:
"A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh." (Ezekiel 36:26)
Jeremiah wrote the law on the heart. Ezekiel replaced the heart.
And Ezekiel saw the Lord’s judgment begin at His own house: "begin at my sanctuary" (Ezekiel 9:6). We’ve heard that before, in our own scripture: "upon my house shall it begin" (D&C 112:25). Jeremiah and Ezekiel wrote to Judah and Jerusalem. Next week, keep reading them as written to us.
Ken Krogue is a co-founder of The Covenant Project and has been deeply searching Isaiah for more than ten years. He writes with two AI research partners, Orson (Claude) and Nathan (ChatGPT), and approves every word.
Return to CFM-07: Jeremiah 1–29 · Explore The Rest of the Book: Jeremiah & Lamentations · Seven Ways People Read Isaiah.
