e (will Duhm tell us?) than by such phrases could the
Prophet have described an inward and purely spiritual process? To say as
Duhm does that the phrases only mean that common men would learn the Law
of God "by heart" (auswendig), is, whoever their author may have been, to
travesty his meaning. Finally, all the phrasing of the New Covenant is in
harmony with the rest of the Prophet's teaching. He had spoken of God's
will to give His people a new heart to know Him;(818) he had taught
religion as the individual's direct knowledge of God;(819) he had won this
himself from God directly without help from his parentage, his
fellow-prophets or priests or any others; he had most bitterly known also
how weak the word of one man is to teach his countrymen this knowledge and
that it can only come by the inward operation of God Himself upon their
spirits; and he had made as clear as ever prophet did that God's pardon
for sin was the first, the necessary preliminary to His other gifts. Nor
is the fact that the New Covenant is to be a national one alien to his
teaching: Jeremiah never lost hope of his nation's survival and
restoration.

Thus the passage on the New Covenant brings together all the strands of
Jeremiah's experience and doctrine and hopes, shaken free from the
political debris of the times, into one fair web under a pattern familiar
and dear to the people. The weaving, it is true, is none of the deftest,
but whether this is due to the aged Jeremiah's failing fingers or to the
awkwardness of a disciple, the stuff and its dyes are all his own.

Lo, days are coming--Rede of the Lord--when I will make with the
House of Israel and with the House of Judah a New Covenant, not
like the Covenant which I made with their fathers in the day that
I took them by their hand to bring them forth from the land of
Egypt, which My Covenant they brake and I rejected them(820)--Rede
of the Lord. But this is My(821) Covenant which I will make with
the sons(822) of Israel after those days--Rede of the Lord--I will
set My Law in their inward part and on their heart will I write
it, and I will be to them a God, and they shall be to Me a people.
And they shall teach no more every man his neighbour and every man
his brother saying, Know thou(823) the Lord! For they shall all
know Me from the least even to the greatest;(824) for I will
forgive their guilt and their sin will I remember no more.