Jeremiah 31:34
“and they shall teach no more every man his neighbor, and every man his brother, saying, Know Yahweh; for they shall all know me, from their least to their greatest, says Yahweh: for I will forgive their iniquity, and their sin will I remember no more.”
Where this sits
The last line of the new covenant passage — the longest single quotation from the Old Testament found in the New, reproduced in full in Hebrews.
Reflection
The clause everyone stops at is the last one, and it raises an obvious difficulty. I will remember no more.
God does not forget. The problem is not solved by pretending otherwise, and Jeremiah is not proposing divine amnesia. In Hebrew, to remember is rarely about retrieving information; it is about acting on something. When God remembers Noah, he does something about Noah. When he remembers a covenant, he keeps it.
So remembering no more is a legal undertaking rather than a mental lapse. It means: I will never act on this again. The record is not deleted; it is permanently unusable. Nothing in your history will be raised against you, on any future occasion, by the only party entitled to raise it.
And notice the word joining this clause to the rest: for. Everything before it — the whole promise that they will all know me, from the least to the greatest, with no more need for one person to teach another — rests on the forgiveness. The knowledge of God is made universally available because the barrier to it has been removed.
From their least to their greatest is worth keeping too. In a society organised by access, where knowledge of God ran through priests and scribes, this is the sentence that abolishes the queue.
- Theme:
- Forgiveness
- Book:
- Jeremiah