The first words Jeremiah says to God are an objection.

The Lord has just told him, "Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations" (Jeremiah 1:5). And the young man from a village of priests answers the way most of us would: "Ah, Lord GOD! behold, I cannot speak: for I am a child" (1:6).

Hold that sentence in mind as you read, because the whole of this week's reading is the answer to it. The Lord does not tell Jeremiah he is wrong about himself. He touches his mouth and says, "Behold, I have put my words in thy mouth" (1:9). By chapter 20, the same man has been mocked, beaten and locked in the stocks (a restraint for prisoners), and he decides to stop speaking for God altogether. He cannot. The word is "in mine heart as a burning fire shut up in my bones" (20:9).

Between those two moments lie some of the most honest, most painful and most hopeful chapters in the Old Testament: a fountain the people walked away from, a temple they trusted instead of God, a potter who starts again, and a promise that no one will be lost track of when the Lord gathers His people. The Come, Follow Me manual puts it simply: "Jeremiah's story is also your story."

Three questions to carry into any chapter this week

1. What is the Lord offering here, and what is being refused?
2. Where is Jeremiah himself in this chapter: speaking, weeping, arguing, or holding on?
3. What would it look like to answer differently than Judah did?

Assigned chapters are in bold. This week walks through all twenty chapters in order, so the assigned chapters make sense where they sit.

Most of these chapters come from the reign of King Jehoiakim; chapters 1–6 come from King Josiah's. The Historical & Cultural Context, section 2, sets out the five kings and why that matters, and section 9 shows how Lehi, preaching in the same city in the same years, carried the same message.

Jeremiah 1 — The Call — assigned

Everything in the book begins here: a call that existed before Jeremiah did, and a young man who does not think he can carry it. The Lord answers him with a promise of His presence (1:8) and with His own words in Jeremiah's mouth (1:9), and gives him a commission that is mostly tearing down, with building and planting at the end (1:10). Key Passages, passage 1, reads the call closely, with what Latter-day Saints call foreordination.

Then two quick visions. The first is an almond branch, and it hides a pun the King James cannot show: the Hebrew word for almond sounds like the word for watching, so the Lord is saying I am watching over my word (Word Studies, study 1). The second is "a seething pot; and the face thereof is toward the north" (1:13): trouble is about to boil over from the north. The chapter ends with a promise that becomes the backbone of the whole book: "they shall fight against thee; but they shall not prevail against thee; for I am with thee" (1:19).

Jeremiah 2 — The Fountain and the Cisterns — assigned

The Lord begins His case against Judah with a memory, and it is a tender one: "I remember thee, the kindness of thy youth, the love of thine espousals, when thou wentest after me in the wilderness" (2:2). Before any accusation comes the honeymoon. Israel was once "holiness unto the LORD" (2:3). That is what makes the rest of the chapter hurt.

What went wrong is the week's most famous image: "they have forsaken me the fountain of living waters, and hewed them out cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water" (2:13). The verse counts two wrongs. The first is leaving the Lord. He says "forsaken me," so the fountain is not a feeling or an idea; it is God Himself. The second is trusting replacements that cannot hold what the people need. No other nation, the Lord says, has ever traded its gods, "which are yet no gods" (2:11), but Israel traded the real one. The Historical & Cultural Context, section 4, explains why springs, wells and cisterns mattered so much in daily life; Key Passages, passage 2, follows the fountain through the book and into later scripture; Word Studies, study 2, explains what made the water living; and Jewish Perspective, section 1, gives the rabbis' answer to why there were only two evils.

Jeremiah 3 — "Yet Return Again to Me" — assigned

Chapter 3 opens with a question from the law of Moses. If a divorced woman marries another man, may her first husband take her back? The law said he "may not take her again to be his wife" (Deuteronomy 24:4). Jeremiah raises exactly that case, "shall he return unto her again?", and then the Lord says what no wronged husband in that law could say: "thou hast played the harlot with many lovers; yet return again to me" (3:1). The Lord's mercy goes further than the rule.

The rest of the chapter keeps calling: "Turn, O backsliding children… for I am married unto you: and I will take you one of a city, and two of a family, and I will bring you to Zion" (3:14). Key Passages, passage 4, reads that gathering. The chapter even looks ahead to a day when people "shall say no more, The ark of the covenant of the LORD" (3:16), a hint of the new covenant that Week 44 reads in chapter 31. And it ends on "Return, ye backsliding children, and I will heal your backslidings" (3:22), a sentence whose Hebrew turns on one root three times (Word Studies, study 3).

Jeremiah 4 — Creation Undone — not assigned

The call to return continues, "Break up your fallow ground, and sow not among thorns" (4:3), "take away the foreskins of your heart" (4:4), and then turns abruptly into an air-raid siren: blow the trumpet, run for the fortified cities, "evil from the north" (4:6). In the middle of the alarm Jeremiah himself cries out, "My bowels, my bowels! I am pained at my very heart" (4:19). The prophet is not a calm announcer of doom; he feels it in his body.

Then comes one of the most startling visions in the prophets: "I beheld the earth, and, lo, it was without form, and void; and the heavens, and they had no light" (4:23). Those are the words of Genesis 1:2, and the Hebrew uses the same two words that describe the world before creation. Judah's sin is pictured as creation running backward. Yet even here: "yet will I not make a full end" (4:27).

Jeremiah 5 — Looking for One Just Person — not assigned

The Lord sends Jeremiah through Jerusalem on a search: "if ye can find a man, if there be any that executeth judgment, that seeketh the truth; and I will pardon it" (5:1). One person would be enough. The search fails among the poor and then among the great. A promise from the call grows sharper here: "I will make my words in thy mouth fire, and this people wood" (5:14). That is the next step in a thread that runs from 1:9 to 20:9 (see "One Thread to Follow" below).

The chapter's details are vivid. The sea is held back by a line of sand (5:22). The rich "judge not the cause, the cause of the fatherless" (5:28). And the most chilling line is about the audience, not the leaders: "The prophets prophesy falsely, and the priests bear rule by their means; and my people love to have it so" (5:31).

Jeremiah 6 — "Peace, Peace" and the Old Paths — not assigned

The enemy from the north draws up its siege. Inside the city, religious leaders treat a deep wound with a bandage: "They have healed also the hurt of the daughter of my people slightly, saying, Peace, peace; when there is no peace" (6:14). It is the slogan of comfortable religion, and Jeremiah will hear it again and again: nearly word for word in 8:11, and from the prophets of 14:13 who promise "assured peace in this place."

Against that, the Lord offers an invitation: "Stand ye in the ways, and see, and ask for the old paths, where is the good way, and walk therein, and ye shall find rest for your souls" (6:16). Centuries later the Savior made almost the same promise, "ye shall find rest unto your souls" (Matthew 11:29). He does not say He is quoting Jeremiah, but no other Old Testament verse has those words. The chapter's answer is heartbreaking: "But they said, We will not walk therein." It closes with an image from metalworking: the bellows blow and the lead is consumed, but the dross will not come out, so "Reprobate silver shall men call them" (6:29–30).

Jeremiah 7 — The Temple Sermon — assigned

Jeremiah is sent to stand at the temple gate and tell the worshippers walking in: "Trust ye not in lying words, saying, The temple of the LORD, The temple of the LORD, The temple of the LORD, are these" (7:4). (Week 39 met this verse as a warning against trusting a past rescue; here it gets its full reading.) The temple was real, and so was the Lord's presence there. The lie was that a building could protect people who refused to change how they treated the stranger, the fatherless and the widow (7:6). The Lord even calls His own house "a den of robbers" (7:11). Key Passages, passage 3, reads the sermon closely, and it is the Savior Himself who later quotes 7:11 when He clears the temple courts.

The rest of the chapter widens the picture. Whole families bake "cakes to the queen of heaven" (7:18; see Historical & Cultural Context, section 6). The Lord sets obedience above sacrifice: "Obey my voice, and I will be your God, and ye shall be my people" (7:23). And in the valley of Hinnom children are burned at Tophet, "which I commanded them not, neither came it into my heart" (7:31; Historical & Cultural Context, section 5). And He points them to the old sanctuary He had once let fall: "go ye now unto my place which was in Shiloh… and see what I did to it" (7:12; Historical & Cultural Context, section 3). That warning would come true for Jerusalem itself; Week 44 reads chapter 39, where the walls are broken down.

Jeremiah 8 — The Stork Knows Her Season — not assigned

"Yea, the stork in the heaven knoweth her appointed times; and the turtle and the crane and the swallow observe the time of their coming; but my people know not the judgment of the LORD" (8:7). Birds read the seasons; Judah cannot read its own moment. The "peace, peace" verses of chapter 6 come back almost unchanged (8:10–12).

Then the chapter turns into one of the saddest laments in scripture: "The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved" (8:20). And then the question: "Is there no balm in Gilead; is there no physician there? why then is not the health of the daughter of my people recovered?" (8:22). The question is asked in grief, not doubt. The healing was there. It was not being received.

Jeremiah 9 — A Fountain of Tears — not assigned

"Oh that my head were waters, and mine eyes a fountain of tears, that I might weep day and night for the slain of the daughter of my people!" (9:1). Verses like this are why Jeremiah is often called the weeping prophet. The word for fountain is the same one the Lord used of Himself in 2:13 (Word Studies, study 2).

The Lord even tells the people to send for the "cunning" (skilled) mourning women and to teach their daughters to wail (9:17–20). Then, in the middle of the grief, comes one of the great invitations of the Old Testament: "Let not the wise man glory in his wisdom, neither let the mighty man glory in his might… But let him that glorieth glory in this, that he understandeth and knoweth me" (9:23–24). Paul drew on that verse twice, "He that glorieth, let him glory in the Lord" (1 Corinthians 1:31; 2 Corinthians 10:17), the first time with "as it is written."

Jeremiah 10 — Idols That Must Be Carried — not assigned

This chapter mocks idols with a craftsman's eye: a tree cut down, decked with silver and gold, nailed in place "that it move not" (10:4). "They must needs be borne, because they cannot go" (10:5): you have to carry your god. "But the LORD is the true God, he is the living God, and an everlasting king" (10:10).

One verse here, 10:11, is written not in Hebrew but in Aramaic, the only verse in Jeremiah that is. It begins "Thus shall ye say unto them," a message for the nations rather than for Judah. The text does not say why this one verse is in Aramaic, but the change of language is plain on the page. The chapter ends on a humble prayer: "O LORD, I know that the way of man is not in himself… O LORD, correct me, but with judgment" (10:23–24).

Jeremiah 11 — A Plot at Home — not assigned

The Lord reminds Judah of "the words of this covenant" (11:2), given when He brought their fathers out of Egypt, "the iron furnace" (11:4). Jeremiah answers, "So be it, O LORD" (11:5). But the covenant has been broken: "the house of Israel and the house of Judah have broken my covenant which I made with their fathers" (11:10).

Then the danger becomes personal. The men of Jeremiah's own hometown, Anathoth, plot to kill him: "Prophesy not in the name of the LORD, that thou die not by our hand" (11:21). He says he had been "like a lamb or an ox that is brought to the slaughter" (11:19). Readers who met Isaiah's "as a lamb to the slaughter" in Isaiah 53:7 in Week 41 will hear a resonance: the innocent sufferer led away. Jeremiah is describing his own danger, not prophesying, but the echo is worth noticing. These verses begin the first of Jeremiah's personal laments, which Key Passages, passage 7, lists. (In Week 44, Jeremiah will buy a field in the same Anathoth, as a sign of hope.)

Jeremiah 12 — Why Do the Wicked Prosper? — not assigned

Jeremiah asks the question every believer eventually asks: "Wherefore doth the way of the wicked prosper?" (12:1). God's answer is not an explanation. It is a harder road: "If thou hast run with the footmen, and they have wearied thee, then how canst thou contend with horses?" (12:5). Even his family has betrayed him (12:6).

Then, surprisingly, God laments too: "I have forsaken mine house, I have left mine heritage; I have given the dearly beloved of my soul into the hand of her enemies" (12:7). The chapter ends with an offer even to Judah's hostile neighbours: if they "diligently learn the ways of my people," "then shall they be built in the midst of my people" (12:16). The building language of 1:10 is back.

Jeremiah 13 — The Ruined Linen Girdle — not assigned

The Lord tells Jeremiah to "get thee a linen girdle" (a waist sash), wear it, then hide it in a hole in the rock by the Euphrates. Many days later he digs it up: "the girdle was marred, it was profitable for nothing" (13:7). The meaning is tender before it is severe: "as the girdle cleaveth to the loins of a man, so have I caused to cleave unto me the whole house of Israel… that they might be unto me for a people, and for a name, and for a praise, and for a glory: but they would not hear" (13:11). Israel was meant to be worn close. The chapter's grief is the prophet's too: "my soul shall weep in secret places for your pride" (13:17).

Jeremiah 14 — Drought, Empty Pits, False Prophets — not assigned

A drought grips the land, and the little ones sent for water "came to the pits, and found no water" (14:3), the broken cisterns of chapter 2 made literal. The people pray beautifully, "O the hope of Israel, the saviour thereof in time of trouble, why shouldest thou be as a stranger in the land" (14:8), but the Lord sees that the prayer is not matched by return. Meanwhile prophets promise "assured peace in this place" (14:13), and the Lord answers, "I sent them not" (14:14). Jeremiah weeps "night and day" (14:17).

Jeremiah 15 — The Prophet at His Lowest — not assigned

"Though Moses and Samuel stood before me, yet my mind could not be toward this people" (15:1): even the greatest intercessors could not turn this judgment. Then Jeremiah's most personal chapter so far: "Woe is me, my mother, that thou hast borne me a man of strife" (15:10). Yet in the middle comes one of the loveliest verses he ever wrote: "Thy words were found, and I did eat them; and thy word was unto me the joy and rejoicing of mine heart" (15:16).

At his lowest he asks if God will be "as waters that fail" (15:18), and God answers with a call to return and a renewal of the first promise: "If thou return… thou shalt be as my mouth" (15:19), and "they shall fight against thee, but they shall not prevail against thee: for I am with thee" (15:20), almost word for word from 1:19.

Jeremiah 16 — A Life That Became the Message — assigned

The Lord asks Jeremiah not to marry, not to enter a house of mourning and not to join a feast (16:2, 5, 8), because Jerusalem was about to lose all three. His own life became a sign. The Historical & Cultural Context, section 7, explains the customs. It is a hard chapter, and it deserves to be read gently; Teaching Applications, section 6, suggests how.

Then the chapter turns to hope, and the hope is enormous. A day will come when people stop swearing by the God who "brought up the children of Israel out of the land of Egypt" and swear instead by the God who brought them "from the land of the north, and from all the lands whither he had driven them" (16:14–15). A second exodus will eclipse the first. Then: "Behold, I will send for many fishers… and after will I send for many hunters" (16:16). Key Passages, passage 4, reads that gathering and how Latter-day Saints have heard it. (The same promise appears again, nearly word for word, in 23:7–8.)

Jeremiah 17 — Two Trees and the Searched Heart — assigned

The chapter opens with Judah's sin "written with a pen of iron, and with the point of a diamond… graven upon the table of their heart" (17:1). Hold that image for Week 44, when the Lord promises to "write it in their hearts" in a new way.

Then come two portraits: the person who "maketh flesh his arm," like a shrub in salt ground, and the one "that trusteth in the LORD," like "a tree planted by the waters" that keeps bearing fruit "in the year of drought" (17:5–8). Week 34's Psalm 1 has the same tree. A few verses later the fountain of chapter 2 is named again (17:13; Key Passages, passage 2, follows it). And at the heart of the chapter: "The heart is deceitful above all things… I the LORD search the heart" (17:9–10). Key Passages, passage 5, reads both, with the risen Lord's own use of 17:10. The chapter ends at the city gates, where Jeremiah calls the people to "hallow ye the sabbath day" (17:22).

Jeremiah 18 — The Potter's House — assigned

"Arise, and go down to the potter's house" (18:2). Jeremiah watches a vessel go wrong "in the hand of the potter," and the potter simply makes it again (18:4). The Lord applies the picture to nations (18:7–10), in the same Hebrew verbs He used at Jeremiah's call: a nation that turns from its evil can still be spared, and He pleads with Judah to do exactly that (18:11). The people refuse: "There is no hope: but we will walk after our own devices" (18:12). They then plot against Jeremiah (18:18), and he prays one of his angriest prayers, asking God to punish them (18:21–23). Scripture records that honestly. Key Passages, passage 6, reads the potter's house.

Jeremiah 19 — The Bottle That Could Not Be Mended — not assigned

This chapter is the other half of chapter 18. This time the pottery is already fired. Jeremiah takes "a potter's earthen bottle" out to the valley of Hinnom and breaks it in front of the city's elders: "Even so will I break this people and this city, as one breaketh a potter's vessel, that cannot be made whole again" (19:11). Then he walks into the temple court and says it again (19:14–15). That is the sermon that lands him in the stocks.

Jeremiah 20 — Fire Shut Up in My Bones — assigned

Pashur the son of Immer, a priest and the temple's "chief governor," strikes Jeremiah and puts him in the stocks overnight (20:1–2). Released the next morning, Jeremiah renames him Magor-missabib, fear on every side (20:3). Then comes the most honest prayer in the book: "O LORD, thou hast deceived me, and I was deceived" (20:7). He decides to quit, and cannot: "his word was in mine heart as a burning fire shut up in my bones… and I could not stay" (20:9). He holds on to the promise of his call, "they shall not prevail" (20:11), and bursts into praise (20:13).

And then, one verse later: "Cursed be the day wherein I was born" (20:14). The chapter ends there, and the book does not resolve that cry for him. Key Passages, passage 7, reads this prayer closely, with Elder Holland's account of it as "the turning point of Jeremiah's life."

If you read only four verses this week, read these, in order. They are the story of a calling from the inside.

Read in sequence, the four verses show something the chapters can hide: the word did not stay outside Jeremiah. It was put in his mouth, then it burned, then he ate it, and at last it lived in his bones. The young man who said "I cannot speak" ended up unable to stop. That is not because he became confident. It is because the word became part of him.

Jeremiah has 52 chapters. This map is for orientation; the walkthrough above covers this week's twenty. The groupings are adapted from the Bible Dictionary's outline, with some rows divided differently to match next week's reading. The New Testament column lists only those uses that have been checked verse by verse, and it says who is speaking.

There is a reason this book opens with a frightened young man and not with a fearless prophet. Most of us know the feeling of 1:6 better than the feeling of 20:9. We have been asked to speak, to teach, to minister, to keep going, and our first honest answer was I can't.

Jeremiah's story does not answer that by making him stronger. It answers it with a Person who was there first: "Before I formed thee… I knew thee." The same Lord who knew him before birth stood with him at the temple gate, sat with him in the stocks, and kept the fire burning when he wanted to let it go out. Centuries later, that Lord walked into the temple courts of the same city and spoke Jeremiah's words Himself.

So this week, read slowly where Jeremiah is weakest: 15:16, when the words were found and eaten; 20:9, when they would not stay shut up. Then notice what the Lord may already be doing with His word in your own life. The Lord who promised Jeremiah "I am with thee to deliver thee" has not changed His promise. And the way back, as chapter 3 keeps saying, is always open: "Return… and I will heal."

• Historical & Cultural Context: the kings, Anathoth, Shiloh, cisterns, Hinnom, Jeremiah and Lehi
• Key Passages: seven passages, from the call to the fire in the bones
• Word Studies: almond and watching; fountain; return and backsliding; "prevail"
• Jewish Perspective: two evils, one sin; how fast forgiveness comes; what was prepared before the world
• Teaching Applications
• Study Questions
• Weekly Insights (this week's separate Insights page)

Continue to Historical & Cultural Context.

The book introduces its author in one line: "The words of Jeremiah the son of Hilkiah, of the priests that were in Anathoth in the land of Benjamin" (Jeremiah 1:1). He was born into a priestly family, in a town of priests, in the tribal territory of Benjamin. The Church's Scripture Helps adds that the Lord called him "when Jeremiah was a young man." The word he uses of himself in 1:6, child, covers a wide range of ages in Hebrew, "anything from infant to young adult."

Anathoth already had a place in Israel's story. When Solomon removed the priest Abiathar from office, he sent him "to Anathoth, unto thine own fields," and the writer of Kings links that removal to "the word of the LORD, which he spake concerning the house of Eli in Shiloh" (1 Kings 2:26–27). Scripture does not say that Jeremiah descended from Abiathar. But when a priest's son from Anathoth later stood in the temple gate and told the worshippers to "go ye now unto my place which was in Shiloh" (7:12), he was naming a place whose story his own town had a part in.

Two other details are worth keeping straight:

• Hilkiah. Jeremiah's father shares his name with "Hilkiah the high priest," who found the book of the law in the temple in King Josiah's day (2 Kings 22:8). Scripture does not say they were the same man.
• Home was not safe either. Later in the book "the men of Anathoth" plot to kill him for prophesying (11:21).

Verses 2–3 date Jeremiah's ministry by kings, and the kings explain a great deal. The Bible Dictionary and the Church's Scripture Helps agree that chapters 1–6 come from King Josiah's reign and chapters 7–20, most of this week's reading, from King Jehoiakim's. The span dated in 1:3 runs "unto the carrying away of Jerusalem captive," the fall of the city in 586 BC. Even that was not the end of his ministry: afterward he was taken to Egypt with the survivors, and the word of the Lord still came to him there (43:6–8; 44:1).

That sequence is the emotional key to the week. A young prophet called under a reforming king lived to see that king killed and an appointee of Egypt take the throne. The Bible Dictionary describes what came next: "After Josiah's death he tried to stem, almost alone, the tide of idolatry and immorality, of self-deception founded on superficial reforms (Jer. 3:4–5; 7:8–10), and of fanatical confidence in the Lord's protection, in which all classes were carried away." Superficial reforms and confidence in the Lord's protection are exactly what the temple sermon confronts.

When Jeremiah told the worshippers at the temple gate to "go ye now unto my place which was in Shiloh… and see what I did to it" (7:12), he was pointing to a story they all knew.

Shiloh was where Samuel's family went up "yearly to worship and to sacrifice" in the days of Eli the priest (1 Samuel 1:3), and where the ark of the covenant was kept. In a war with the Philistines, Israel's elders fetched the ark out of Shiloh "that, when it cometh among us, it may save us," and "the ark of God was taken" (1 Samuel 4:3–11). A psalm remembers the outcome: the Lord "forsook the tabernacle of Shiloh" (Psalm 78:60). Scripture Helps sums up Jeremiah's point: the Lord "reminded the people that the tabernacle in Shiloh in the Northern Kingdom had been destroyed and that the people had been taken away captive."

So Shiloh was more than a ruin. It was the precedent for exactly what Jerusalem was doing: treating a holy object as a guarantee. And the comparison was not received calmly. When Jeremiah later repeated that "this house shall be like Shiloh," "all the people were gathered against Jeremiah in the house of the LORD" (Jeremiah 26:9).

Week 39 looked at why Jerusalem's people could believe their city would never fall, after its deliverance from Assyria a century earlier; see Week 39's Historical & Cultural Context, section 1. Key Passages, passage 3, reads the sermon itself.

Scripture Helps describes a land where "rainfall was scarce and natural water sources were rare," and explains:

"Cisterns were man-made pits dug into the ground to collect and store rainwater… Cisterns were often lined with plaster to make them watertight. If a cistern developed cracks, it could no longer retain water and became useless."

Water came from three kinds of places. Jeremiah 2:13 sets two of them side by side, the spring and the cistern; the well, the third, shows how much daily life depended on water.

• A spring (the fountain of 2:13) is water that rises out of the ground by itself. Someone still had to walk to it and carry the water home, but no one had to fill it.
• A well is dug down to reach water below the surface. Scripture's well scenes show how much depended on one. Hagar, alone in the wilderness with her son, found water only when "God opened her eyes, and she saw a well of water" (Genesis 21:19). Abraham had to reprove Abimelech over "a well of water, which Abimelech's servants had violently taken away" (21:25). And Abraham's servant waited by a well "at the time of the evening, even the time that women go out to draw water" (Genesis 24:11). Water meant daily work, for households and their animals, and it could be fought over.
• A cistern stores rain. It was dug out, plastered, and filled only when the rain came. A cracked one leaked away what it held, and that made it worse than useless, because people had counted on it.

Building a cistern was not wrong. It was ordinary, sensible work, and many families depended on one. That is exactly why the image lands. Everyone who heard Jeremiah knew the difference between a living spring and a tank of stored rain, and no one would leave the spring to rely on a cracked tank. The wrong in 2:13 is that exchange. Key Passages, passage 2, follows the fountain and the cisterns through the book and into later scripture.

Water, or its absence, comes back in the story of Jeremiah's own life. Week 44 reads how he was let down "with cords" into a dungeon where "there was no water, but mire."

Twice in these chapters the Lord speaks of "the valley of the son of Hinnom": in 7:31–32 He describes what the people have built there, and in 19:2 He sends Jeremiah there. The Bible Dictionary places it "south and west of Jerusalem" ("Hinnom, Valley of"). Tophet was the site in that valley where children were burned as offerings (7:31). King Manasseh had made "his son pass through the fire" (2 Kings 21:6). Josiah's reform had defiled Tophet to stop it (2 Kings 23:10). Yet in Jehoiakim's day Jeremiah describes it as in use again.

Scripture speaks of this with restraint, and so will we. What matters for the reading is the Lord's own response. In both places He says He "commanded… not" this, and that it never even entered His thoughts: "neither came it into my heart" (7:31), "neither came it into my mind" (19:5). The God of Israel distances Himself not only from the act but from the very idea of it.

The valley's name had a long afterlife. The same Bible Dictionary entry adds: "In New Testament times it was called Gehenna and was regarded by the Jews as symbolic of the place of torment." Jeremiah had prophesied that it would be renamed "the valley of slaughter" (7:32; 19:6).

Read Jeremiah 7:17–18 closely and you will see a whole family at work:

"The children gather wood, and the fathers kindle the fire, and the women knead their dough, to make cakes to the queen of heaven, and to pour out drink offerings unto other gods…"

Jeremiah does not tell us who this "queen of heaven" was, and this guide does not guess. What the verse makes plain is that the worship was not a private lapse by a few. It was a household project, involving children, fathers and mothers together, and done "in the streets of Jerusalem" (7:17). These verses follow straight on from "pray not thou for this people" (7:16): "Seest thou not what they do…?" The whole community had organised its life around another devotion.

In chapter 16 the Lord asks Jeremiah to make his own life a sign. He was not to marry or have children "in this place" (16:2). He was not to enter a "house of mourning" (16:5) or a "house of feasting" (16:8).

The chapter names the customs that would stop. Some were ordinary comforts: lamenting the dead, and giving mourners "the cup of consolation to drink for their father or for their mother" (16:7). Others, cutting oneself and shaving the head for the dead (16:6), were practices the law of Moses had already forbidden (Leviticus 19:28; Deuteronomy 14:1). The prophecy is that neither kind would happen, because the dead would be too many to bury or lament (16:4–6).

The weddings would cease too: "the voice of the bridegroom, and the voice of the bride" (16:9). A man who never married, never sat with mourners and never joined a feast was a living picture of a city about to lose all three. The sign asked a great deal of him. Teaching Applications suggests how to talk about this chapter gently.

Chapter 20 opens with an official: "Pashur the son of Immer the priest, who was also chief governor in the house of the LORD" (20:1). He struck Jeremiah and "put him in the stocks that were in the high gate of Benjamin, which was by the house of the LORD" (20:2). The stocks were a restraint for prisoners, and this punishment was carried out beside the temple itself. Jeremiah was released "on the morrow" (20:3).

Keep two men named Pashur apart. This one is "the son of Immer." A different Pashur, "the son of Melchiah," appears in 21:1, and the King James spells his father's name "Malchiah" when he appears again in 38:1. Naming the father each time keeps them separate.

Jeremiah and Lehi lived in the same city in the same years. Scripture Helps lists Lehi among the prophets of Jeremiah's lifetime, with Ezekiel, Daniel, Habakkuk and Zephaniah. Nephi describes the year his father began to prophesy: "in the commencement of the first year of the reign of Zedekiah… there came many prophets, prophesying unto the people that they must repent, or the great city Jerusalem must be destroyed" (1 Nephi 1:4). By then Jeremiah had been preaching for decades.

The Book of Mormon names him three times:

• The brass plates carried "many prophecies which have been spoken by the mouth of Jeremiah" (1 Nephi 5:13). Lehi's family took some of Jeremiah's words with them to the promised land.
• Nephi knew what was happening to him. "They have rejected the prophets, and Jeremiah have they cast into prison" (1 Nephi 7:14).
• Centuries later, the prophet Nephi, son of Helaman, cited him as a fulfilled witness: "Jerusalem was destroyed according to the words of Jeremiah" (Helaman 8:20).

Elder Quentin L. Cook drew the connection in General Conference: "Jeremiah was a contemporary of the prophet Lehi." And of Lehi: "Initially his was a voice of warning, but after faithfully declaring the same message as Jeremiah, Lehi was commanded by the Lord to take his family and depart into the wilderness" ("Lamentations of Jeremiah: Beware of Bondage," October 2013). Both men were mocked; both had their lives sought (1 Nephi 1:19–20; Jeremiah 11:21). Lehi was commanded to leave; Jeremiah stayed in Jerusalem and kept preaching.

Laman and Lemuel's refusal to believe Jerusalem could fall was the subject of Week 39's context section; it is not repeated here.

• Bible Dictionary, "Jeremiah". The ministry's dates, the reigns, and the arrangement of the book.
• Scripture Helps: Old Testament, "Jeremiah 1–3; 7; 16–18; 20". Cisterns, Shiloh, the east wind of 18:17, and more.
• For a scholarly comparison of the two prophets, Scripture Helps points to David R. Seely and JoAnn H. Seely, "Lehi and Jeremiah: Prophets, Priests, and Patriarchs," Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 8, no. 2 (1999), 24–35.

The Text

"Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations. Then said I, Ah, Lord GOD! behold, I cannot speak: for I am a child." (Jeremiah 1:5–6)

"Then the LORD put forth his hand, and touched my mouth. And the LORD said unto me, Behold, I have put my words in thy mouth." (Jeremiah 1:9)

How the Passage Works

Before Jeremiah says a single word, God has already said four things about him: formed, knew, sanctified, ordained. All four are in the past. The call does not begin with what Jeremiah can do. It begins with what God has already done.

Then Jeremiah answers, and his objection is entirely about the present: "I cannot speak: for I am a child." Watch how the Lord replies. He answers the present with the future ("thou shalt go to all that I shall send thee, and whatsoever I command thee thou shalt speak," 1:7) and with a presence: "Be not afraid of their faces: for I am with thee to deliver thee" (1:8). Then He touches the very mouth Jeremiah said could not speak, and fills it.

So the young man's problem is never solved the way he framed it. He is not turned into a confident speaker. He becomes a man with someone else's words in his mouth, and that turns out to be the whole book. Hold on to 1:9, because chapter 20 ends with those words burning in him. Passage 7 below picks that up, and the Week Overview follows the thread chapter by chapter.

Now count the verbs in 1:10: "to root out, and to pull down, and to destroy, and to throw down, to build, and to plant." Four verbs to clear ground, two to build. Most of Jeremiah's preaching will be the first four, but the commission does not end there, and neither does the book. Keep an eye out for build and plant; they come back in the potter's house (Passage 6 below).

Latter-day Saints have a name for what 1:5 describes. Foreordination means being called and prepared, before this life, for work to do in it. Alma describes those who were "called and prepared from the foundation of the world according to the foreknowledge of God", and in the same breath says they were "in the first place being left to choose good or evil" (Alma 13:3). A calling known in advance is not a script imposed on a person. Jeremiah could still object, and he did (1:6). Later he even tried to quit (20:9).

Latter-day Saint Connections

• Abraham 3:22–23 gives the premortal scene behind 1:5: among "the noble and great ones" God says to Abraham, "thou wast chosen before thou wast born." Doctrine and Covenants 138:56 adds that such spirits "received their first lessons in the world of spirits and were prepared to come forth in the due time of the Lord."
• Paul describes his own call in nearly Jeremiah's terms: God "separated me from my mother's womb, and called me by his grace" (Galatians 1:15). He does not cite Jeremiah, so read it as an echo of the call pattern, not a quotation.
• Elder Russell M. Nelson, "Decisions for Eternity" (October 2013), a direct application. After quoting the Lord's word to Abraham, he widens it: "The Lord said something similar about Jeremiah and many others. He even said it about you. Your Heavenly Father has known you for a very long time." (churchofjesuschrist.org)
• Elder Jeffrey R. Holland, "A Teacher Come from God" (April 1998), a direct treatment. He says Jeremiah "felt the way most teachers or speakers or Church officers feel when called—inexperienced, inadequate, frightened." (churchofjesuschrist.org) The rest of his account belongs to chapter 20, in Passage 7.

Study Questions

1. God's four verbs in 1:5 are all in the past; Jeremiah's objection in 1:6 is all in the present. What does the order of those two verses teach about where a calling starts?
2. The Lord never tells Jeremiah he is a good speaker. What does He give him instead, and why might that be better?
3. Of the six verbs in 1:10, four tear down and two build. What in your own life might need clearing before something can be planted?

The Text

"Be astonished, O ye heavens, at this, and be horribly afraid, be ye very desolate, saith the LORD. For my people have committed two evils; they have forsaken me the fountain of living waters, and hewed them out cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water." (Jeremiah 2:12–13)

How the Passage Works

The verse counts two wrongs, not one, and that is the key to it. Leaving the Lord, the living source, is the first. The second is trusting replacements of their own making to do what only He can do.

A "fountain of living waters" is a spring: water that comes up from below on its own and keeps flowing fresh (Word Studies, study 2, explains the Hebrew word for living). A cistern is a pit cut into rock to catch rain and store it (the Historical & Cultural Context, section 4, explains how they were made and why families needed them). The trouble was never the cistern itself. The sin is the exchange. Now read the verb again: they hewed them out. Israel did not drift into the second evil. They worked at replacing the Lord, and what they made leaked. The same chapter points to what some of those replacements were: running to Egypt "to drink the waters of Sihor" and to Assyria "to drink the waters of the river" (2:18), looking to foreign powers for the security only the Lord could give.

The verses just before set the scale. Cross to the isles of Chittim, send as far as Kedar, the Lord says, and see whether anyone has done this: "Hath a nation changed their gods, which are yet no gods? but my people have changed their glory for that which doth not profit" (2:10–11). Even nations whose gods are not real keep faith with them. Israel had the real thing and traded it. No wonder the heavens are told to be astonished.

Follow the water through the book. In a drought, the little ones sent for water come "to the pits, and found no water" (14:3). At his lowest, Jeremiah asks whether God Himself will be to him "as waters that fail" (15:18). And in chapter 17 the title from chapter 2 comes back, inside a prayer that still names the forsaking: "O LORD, the hope of Israel, all that forsake thee shall be ashamed, and they that depart from me shall be written in the earth, because they have forsaken the LORD, the fountain of living waters" (17:13). The prayer does not pretend the people have come back. But it calls the Lord by His right name, and the fountain is still there to return to.

Israel's hymns use a related image. A psalm says to the Lord, "For with thee is the fountain of life: in thy light shall we see light" (Psalm 36:9). The wording is related rather than identical, but the thought is close to Jeremiah's: life comes from God, the way water comes from a spring.

Jewish teachers asked a sharp question about this verse: why only two evils, when the people had done so much worse? Their answer, in Jewish Perspective, section 1, reads the two evils as one sin seen from two sides: leaving the true God and taking up a false one are a single act. That reading and this one can stand together. Here the two halves of the exchange are taken one at a time, to see what each costs; there they are a single turning.

Reading in layers. In its own setting (what Jewish interpreters call the peshat, the plain sense; see CFM Corner's PaRDeS article), the fountain is the Lord Himself, and the evil is leaving Him for what cannot hold. Later scripture picks the image up and fills it out. The scripture connections below are those later echoes; they deepen the verse, but they are not claims about what Jeremiah himself meant. The last item, Elder Wirthlin's talk, is a third layer: application, showing how the verse speaks to lives today.

Latter-day Saint Connections

• The Savior's offer to the woman at the well reads like an answer to 2:13: "If thou knewest the gift of God… he would have given thee living water," and "whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst" (John 4:10, 14). John does not quote Jeremiah, so this is a thematic echo, not a quotation. But the contrast is a close one. The water from Jacob's well quenches physical thirst for a time ("Whosoever drinketh of this water shall thirst again," 4:13); Jesus offers a gift that becomes "a well of water springing up into everlasting life" (John 4:14).
• At the feast, the Savior widens the invitation: "If any man thirst, let him come unto me, and drink. He that believeth on me, as the scripture hath said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water." John then explains those rivers himself: "this spake he of the Spirit" (John 7:37–39). That explanation is John's, given for Jesus' words. It shows how the image was opened up in the New Testament, not what the Hebrew word meant in Jeremiah's day.
• Nephi meets the same expression in his vision of the tree of life. The rod of iron "was the word of God, which led to the fountain of living waters, or to the tree of life; which waters are a representation of the love of God" (1 Nephi 11:25). The words match Jeremiah 2:13, but here they are not a name for the Lord. The fountain is a place the rod leads to, and Nephi learns what its waters represent (the love of God) and what leads to them (the word of God). The Book of Mormon does not say where Nephi's wording came from, so this is a shared image, not a stated borrowing.
• The Restoration adds a promise: "unto him that keepeth my commandments I will give the mysteries of my kingdom, and the same shall be in him a well of living water, springing up unto everlasting life" (D&C 63:23). Here the well of living water is tied to the mysteries of His kingdom, which He promises to those who keep His commandments. That is one use of the image, not a rule that water always means knowledge.
• Elder Joseph B. Wirthlin, "Living Water to Quench Spiritual Thirst" (April 1995), a direct treatment. He quotes 2:13 and applies it plainly: "Too many of our Heavenly Father's children spend their precious lives carving out broken cisterns of worldly gain that cannot hold the living water that satisfies fully their natural thirst for everlasting truth." Earlier in the same talk he names the fountain: "As at Jacob's well, so today the Lord Jesus Christ is the only source of living water." (churchofjesuschrist.org)

Study Questions

1. The verse names two evils: leaving the fountain, and trusting broken cisterns in its place. Why might the Lord count the second as a wrong of its own, and not just as the result of the first?
2. Encouragement from others, meaningful achievements, and everyday comforts can bless our lives. The question is whether we let them replace our trust in the Lord. When you feel uncertain or discouraged, where do you turn for reassurance? What could turning to the Lord through prayer, scripture, and seeking His guidance look like in that situation?
3. Read 2:13, then 15:18, then 17:13. How does the book move from doubt back to the fountain?

The Text

"Trust ye not in lying words, saying, The temple of the LORD, The temple of the LORD, The temple of the LORD, are these." (Jeremiah 7:4)

"Will ye steal, murder, and commit adultery, and swear falsely, and burn incense unto Baal, and walk after other gods whom ye know not; And come and stand before me in this house, which is called by my name, and say, We are delivered to do all these abominations? Is this house, which is called by my name, become a den of robbers in your eyes? Behold, even I have seen it, saith the LORD." (Jeremiah 7:9–11)

How the Passage Works

A holy place cannot protect people from the change they refuse to make. That is the whole sermon, and Jeremiah preaches it in the most uncomfortable place possible: "Stand in the gate of the LORD's house" (7:2), facing the worshippers as they walk in.

The "lying words" of verse 4 are not lies about the temple. The temple really was the LORD's. The lie was the slogan's promise: say it three times and you are safe. Verses 5–7 replace the slogan with conditions, and they are concrete: "if ye throughly execute judgment between a man and his neighbour; If ye oppress not the stranger, the fatherless, and the widow, and shed not innocent blood in this place, neither walk after other gods… Then will I cause you to dwell in this place." The promise of the land is still on offer. It is attached to how people treat each other.

Now try something with verse 9. Read its list beside the Ten Commandments in Exodus 20. Steal, murder, adultery, false swearing, other gods: it reads like a roll call of broken commandments. Then comes the line that explains the image of verse 11. They walk in from all of that and say, "We are delivered." A den is where robbers go between raids to be safe. Read verses 10 and 11 together and the picture explains itself: the temple had become their hideout.

Verse 12 sends them to look at Shiloh, where the tabernacle once stood: "see what I did to it." Shiloh's sanctuary had been lost long before; a psalm says the Lord "forsook the tabernacle of Shiloh" (Psalm 78:60). The Historical & Cultural Context, section 3, tells the story. The prophets and priests of the day had another reassuring slogan too, "Peace, peace; when there is no peace" (6:14); the Week Overview follows it through chapters 6 and 8.

A hard verse, read in its place. A few lines later the Lord tells Jeremiah, "pray not thou for this people… for I will not hear thee" (7:16). It is said of a people who had been called again and again and "answered not" (7:13). It is not a teaching that God stops listening to anyone who prays. And Jeremiah does not stop caring about them. Later he reminds God, "I stood before thee to speak good for them" (18:20).

Latter-day Saint Connections

• The Savior Himself used this verse. When He cleared the temple courts in Jerusalem, He joined Jeremiah 7:11 to Isaiah 56:7: "It is written, My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves" (Matthew 21:13; also Mark 11:17 and Luke 19:46). The King James translators wrote "robbers" in Jeremiah and "thieves" in the Gospels; it is the same image. Only Mark keeps Isaiah's wider clause (Isaiah says "for all people"; Mark has "of all nations"), a reminder of what the house was for. These are the Lord's own words, spoken in the same city.
• Elder D. Todd Christofferson, "Worship" (April 2025), a thematic parallel. He does not speak of Jeremiah, but he names the same danger: "Whatever takes precedence over worship of the Father and the Son becomes an idol." And: "Even those who purport to worship God but do not keep His commandments are walking in their own way…" (churchofjesuschrist.org)

Study Questions

1. The temple really was the LORD's house, yet the slogan about it was a lie. How can something true be used as a false guarantee?
2. Verses 5–7 name neighbours, strangers, the fatherless and the widow. Why might the Lord tie the promise of the land to them?
3. Read Matthew 21:12–13. What does it add to know that the Savior chose Jeremiah's words for that moment?

The Text

"Therefore, behold, the days come, saith the LORD, that it shall no more be said, The LORD liveth, that brought up the children of Israel out of the land of Egypt; But, The LORD liveth, that brought up the children of Israel from the land of the north, and from all the lands whither he had driven them: and I will bring them again into their land that I gave unto their fathers. Behold, I will send for many fishers, saith the LORD, and they shall fish them; and after will I send for many hunters, and they shall hunt them from every mountain, and from every hill, and out of the holes of the rocks." (Jeremiah 16:14–16)

"Turn, O backsliding children, saith the LORD; for I am married unto you: and I will take you one of a city, and two of a family, and I will bring you to Zion." (Jeremiah 3:14)

How the Passage Works

"The LORD liveth" was how an Israelite took an oath ("thou shalt swear, The LORD liveth," 4:2), and the oath remembered Egypt: the God who brought us out. Jeremiah says a day is coming when the rescue will be so great that people will swear by it instead. A second exodus will eclipse the first.

Notice where it comes from: "the land of the north." That is the direction the danger came from in Jeremiah's first vision ("Out of the north an evil shall break forth," 1:14). The place of the threat becomes the place of the rescue.

Then the fishers and hunters. Read one verse further before deciding what they mean: "For mine eyes are upon all their ways: they are not hid from my face" (16:17). In its own setting the search finds sin as well as people, and verse 18 speaks of recompense. Read as judgment, the fishers and hunters find the guilty; read as gathering, they find the lost. Either way, no one is lost track of. Nobody is too far into the rocks to be found. Latter-day Saints have long heard the gathering in this verse, and the chapter supports that hope: two verses later, "the Gentiles shall come unto thee from the ends of the earth" (16:19).

Chapter 3 shows how small the gathering can be: "one of a city, and two of a family." It is not a crowd swept up together. It is a person here and a household there, gathered by a God who says "I am married unto you." The chapter's call, "Turn, O backsliding children," sets two Hebrew words side by side, one for turning back and one for turning away. They come from the same root (Word Studies shows how), and Jewish Perspective shows how the rabbis read 3:14 together with 3:22.

Latter-day Saint Connections

• Doctrine and Covenants 110:11 records that in the Kirtland Temple Moses "committed unto us the keys of the gathering of Israel from the four parts of the earth, and the leading of the ten tribes from the land of the north." The man who led the first exodus hands over the keys of the gathering, and the revelation uses Jeremiah's own direction: the land of the north.
• Elder Russell M. Nelson, "The Gathering of Scattered Israel" (October 2006), a direct application. He alludes to 16:16: "In many nations our missionaries have searched for those of scattered Israel; they have hunted for them 'out of the holes of the rocks'; and they have fished for them as in ancient days." And he adds: "The choice to come unto Christ is not a matter of physical location; it is a matter of individual commitment." (churchofjesuschrist.org)
• The Savior called His first disciples with the same picture: "Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men" (Matthew 4:19). He does not cite Jeremiah there; it is the same image in His own words.

Study Questions

1. Why would a new rescue be described by comparing it with Egypt? What would have to happen for a people to stop telling their oldest story first?
2. "One of a city, and two of a family." What does that phrase suggest about how the Lord gathers people today?
3. Read 16:16–17 together. How does knowing that the Lord sees "all their ways" make the gathering more hopeful, not less?

The Text

"Thus saith the LORD; Cursed be the man that trusteth in man, and maketh flesh his arm, and whose heart departeth from the LORD. For he shall be like the heath in the desert, and shall not see when good cometh… Blessed is the man that trusteth in the LORD, and whose hope the LORD is. For he shall be as a tree planted by the waters, and that spreadeth out her roots by the river, and shall not see when heat cometh, but her leaf shall be green; and shall not be careful in the year of drought, neither shall cease from yielding fruit." (Jeremiah 17:5–8)

"The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it? I the LORD search the heart, I try the reins, even to give every man according to his ways, and according to the fruit of his doings." (Jeremiah 17:9–10)

How the Passage Works

What you lean on decides what you become in a dry year. Jeremiah paints it as two plants.

The first is a desert shrub, "the heath in the desert," rooted in salt ground. The second is a tree that sends its roots out to the river. Now look closely at one phrase, which the King James Version uses for both. The shrub "shall not see when good cometh": when rain finally comes, it is in no state to drink. The tree "shall not see when heat cometh": when the heat arrives, it hardly notices. Same words, opposite results. (In verse 8 the Hebrew letters can also be read shall not fear, and that is how the ancient Greek and Latin translations took it. Either way, the tree is untroubled when the heat comes.)

And notice what the blessing does not promise. The heat still comes. There is still "the year of drought." Trusting the Lord does not cancel the dry year; it changes where your roots reach. The tree "shall not be careful", and careful here has its older meaning, full of care, anxious (it is the word in "Martha, Martha, thou art careful and troubled about many things," Luke 10:41). It still bears fruit.

If this tree sounds familiar, it should. Psalm 1:3, which we read in Week 34, has "a tree planted by the rivers of water" whose "leaf also shall not wither." Set them side by side and you will find the same tree, water, leaf and fruit. Jeremiah adds the heat and the drought.

Then verse 9 turns inward, and it is one of the bleakest sentences in the book: "The heart is deceitful above all things… who can know it?" If you stopped there, you might despair of ever knowing your own motives. Verse 10 does not stop there. Someone can know it: "I the LORD search the heart." Twice more Jeremiah appeals to that same searching: to the God "that triest the reins and the heart" (11:20), and to the LORD "that triest the righteous, and seest the reins and the heart" (20:12), trusting Him to judge what he cannot. A few lines after verse 10 he prays, "Heal me, O LORD, and I shall be healed" (17:14). The answer to a heart you cannot read is the One who can, not harder self-examination. Verses 9–10 are also one of Jeremiah's personal laments; Passage 7 below says more about those.

Latter-day Saint Connections

• Nephi uses almost the same words. In his psalm he writes: "I will not put my trust in the arm of flesh; for I know that cursed is he that putteth his trust in the arm of flesh. Yea, cursed is he that putteth his trust in man or maketh flesh his arm" (2 Nephi 4:34). Set it beside 17:5. Nephi's family carried the brass plates out of Jerusalem, and they contained "many prophecies which have been spoken by the mouth of Jeremiah" (1 Nephi 5:13). Nephi does not name his source, but the wording is very close.
• The risen Lord describes Himself in 17:10's terms: "I am he which searcheth the reins and hearts: and I will give unto every one of you according to your works" (Revelation 2:23). It is an allusion rather than a quotation, and it puts the searching of hearts in the hands of the Savior.
• Elder Marion D. Hanks, "I Will Look unto the Lord" (October 1986), a direct citation. He quotes 17:5 beside Micah's "I will look unto the Lord," and guards against reading it as never trust anyone: "Yet, in matters of lasting importance, one must not rely only on 'the arm of flesh' at the expense of looking to the Lord in scripture and in prayer." (churchofjesuschrist.org)

Study Questions

1. Both plants "shall not see" something. What does each one miss, and why?
2. The tree still lives through "the year of drought." How does that change what you expect faith to do for you in a hard season?
3. Verse 9 asks who can know the heart; verse 10 answers. When have you been glad that the Lord knows you better than you know yourself?

The Text

"Then I went down to the potter's house, and, behold, he wrought a work on the wheels. And the vessel that he made of clay was marred in the hand of the potter: so he made it again another vessel, as seemed good to the potter to make it." (Jeremiah 18:3–4)

"O house of Israel, cannot I do with you as this potter? saith the LORD. Behold, as the clay is in the potter's hand, so are ye in mine hand, O house of Israel." (Jeremiah 18:6)

"Then shalt thou break the bottle in the sight of the men that go with thee, And shalt say unto them, Thus saith the LORD of hosts; Even so will I break this people and this city, as one breaketh a potter's vessel, that cannot be made whole again…" (Jeremiah 19:10–11)

How the Passage Works

While the clay is still soft, the potter can start again. That is the good news of chapter 18, and it is very good news.

Look at where the vessel is when it goes wrong: "marred in the hand of the potter." It is still in his hands when it fails, and he simply begins again: "so he made it again another vessel." The words made it again translate the ordinary Hebrew verb for return, the same verb Jeremiah uses when he calls the people to come back. Word Studies shows it.

Then the Lord explains what the image means for a nation, and the verbs of Jeremiah's call come back. If He speaks "to pluck up, and to pull down, and to destroy" a nation, and it turns from its evil, He "will repent of the evil"; if He speaks "to build and to plant it" and it turns to evil, the good is withdrawn (18:7–10). (Pluck up is the same Hebrew verb that 1:10 translates "root out.") A warning from God is an invitation to change while there is time. So He says it outright: "return ye now every one from his evil way" (18:11).

And the people answer: "There is no hope: but we will walk after our own devices" (18:12). It is the saddest line in the chapter, because it is not true. There was hope. They were the ones closing the door.

So chapter 19 changes the pottery. This time Jeremiah is told to "get a potter's earthen bottle", a vessel already fired and hard. He carries it out to the valley of Hinnom (the place where children had been burned as offerings at Tophet, 7:31; the Historical & Cultural Context, section 5, tells more) and smashes it: "as one breaketh a potter's vessel, that cannot be made whole again." Soft clay can be reworked; fired clay can only be broken. The two chapters belong together, and the difference between them is time. Then Jeremiah repeats the message in the temple court (19:14–15), and that is what lands him in the stocks in chapter 20.

Latter-day Saint Connections

• Elder Hugh W. Pinnock, "Beginning Again" (April 1982), a direct treatment. He reads 18:2–6 in full and draws the hope out of it: "we can take what we have marred and begin again. The potter did not give up and throw the clay away, just because he had made a mistake." (churchofjesuschrist.org) He dwells on the hopeful half of the chapter, which is the half the Lord holds out. Chapter 19 shows why that chance to be reshaped is offered now, while the clay is still soft.
• Elder Richard J. Maynes, "The Joy of Living a Christ-Centered Life" (October 2015), a thematic parallel. He does not cite Jeremiah. His text is Isaiah's "we are the clay, and thou our potter" (Isaiah 64:8, from last week's reading). His point is about clay on a wheel: "like the clay on the potter's wheel, our lives must be centered with exactness in Christ if we are to find true joy and peace in this life." (churchofjesuschrist.org)

Study Questions

1. The vessel is marred "in the hand of the potter." What comfort is there in where it was when it went wrong?
2. The people say "There is no hope" at the very moment hope is offered. Why might someone choose that answer?
3. Soft clay in chapter 18, fired clay in chapter 19. What keeps a heart soft enough to be reshaped?

The Text

"O LORD, thou hast deceived me, and I was deceived: thou art stronger than I, and hast prevailed: I am in derision daily, every one mocketh me." (Jeremiah 20:7)

"Then I said, I will not make mention of him, nor speak any more in his name. But his word was in mine heart as a burning fire shut up in my bones, and I was weary with forbearing, and I could not stay." (Jeremiah 20:9)

"But the LORD is with me as a mighty terrible one: therefore my persecutors shall stumble, and they shall not prevail…" (Jeremiah 20:11)

How the Passage Works

This is one of the most honest prayers in scripture: a prophet who decided to quit, and found that he could not.

It comes straight after a beating. Pashur the son of Immer, a priest who was "chief governor in the house of the LORD", heard the broken-bottle sermon of chapter 19, struck Jeremiah, and locked him overnight in the stocks at the Benjamin gate (20:1–2). When he is released, Jeremiah gives Pashur a new name, Magor-missabib, which means fear on every side (20:3).

Then the prayer, and it begins with an accusation: "thou hast deceived me." The word can also mean enticed or persuaded, and that sense fits a man who feels he was talked into a calling that has brought him nothing but mockery. Three verses later his enemies use the same verb about him, hoping "he will be enticed" (20:10). Word Studies has more on that. And listen to what his enemies whisper: "fear on every side." It is the very name he had just given Pashur.

Verse 9 is the turning point. He resolves to stop, and he cannot: the word is "a burning fire shut up in my bones." The Lord who put words in a frightened young man's mouth in chapter 1 has not let them go cold. The Week Overview traces that thread from 1:9 to here.

Now watch one word. God "hast prevailed" (20:7). His enemies hope that "we shall prevail against him" (20:10). And faith answers: "they shall not prevail" (20:11). That is the promise from the day of his call, in the same words: "they shall fight against thee; but they shall not prevail against thee; for I am with thee" (1:19), repeated when he was at his lowest in 15:20. The promise did not keep him out of the stocks. It kept him from being overcome.

Then he sings: "Sing unto the LORD, praise ye the LORD" (20:13). And the very next verse is "Cursed be the day wherein I was born" (20:14). Scripture does not tidy that up, and we should not either. Faith and despair sit one verse apart. The chapter ends there, without a rebuke, and the prayer is kept, word for word, for every reader who has felt both in one day.

This prayer (20:7–12 in the list below) is the second-to-last of the personal laments in these chapters. The Church's Scripture Helps, following the scholar S. Kent Brown, lists them as 11:18–12:6; 15:10–21; 17:9–10, 14–18; 18:18–23; 20:7–12; and 20:14–18. Some of them ask God to punish Jeremiah's enemies (18:21–23). Scripture records those honestly. It does not ask us to pray them.

Latter-day Saint Connections

• Elder Jeffrey R. Holland, "A Teacher Come from God" (April 1998), a direct treatment. He tells Jeremiah's story as every teacher's story. After the mockery, "Jeremiah vowed, in effect, never to teach another lesson," and then: "But then came the turning point of Jeremiah's life. Something had been happening with every testimony he had borne, every scripture he had read, every truth he had taught." Quoting 20:9, he concludes, "That is what happens in the gospel to both the teacher and the taught," and sets beside it Nephi and Lehi, who "were filled as if with fire" (Helaman 5:45). (churchofjesuschrist.org)
• Lehi preached in the same city in the same years, and met the same response: "the Jews did mock him… and they also sought his life" (1 Nephi 1:19–20). The Historical & Cultural Context sets the two prophets side by side.

Study Questions

1. Jeremiah says God "deceived" or "enticed" him. Is it faithful or faithless to say something that honest in a prayer?
2. Elder Holland says "something had been happening" with every truth Jeremiah taught. What has been building in you through the scriptures you have kept reading, even on dry days?
3. Verse 13 is praise and verse 14 is a curse. What does it mean to you that scripture keeps both?

Continue to Word Studies.

Four words this week are threads you can follow through your own Bible. Each one is hidden a little by English translation, and each one changes how a familiar verse sounds once you hear it. No Hebrew is needed. Every study starts with the English text, then shows what the Hebrew adds, then looks at what two ancient translations did with the word.

Three names are worth knowing once. The Septuagint is the Greek translation of the Old Testament made by Jewish scholars before the time of Christ; it is the version the New Testament writers most often quote. Swete is the scholar whose printed edition of that Greek text is quoted here. The Vulgate is the Latin translation associated with Jerome, which Western Christians read for centuries. Where these translations keep a link that English loses, or lose one that English keeps, you learn something about the word.

One practical note: the verse English Bibles number Jeremiah 9:1 is numbered 8:23 in Hebrew Bibles, so a Hebrew reference to "8:23" means the same verse.

Right after his call, Jeremiah is shown a very ordinary thing:

"Jeremiah, what seest thou? And I said, I see a rod of an almond tree. Then said the LORD unto me, Thou hast well seen: for I will hasten my word to perform it." (Jeremiah 1:11–12)

In English the vision seems to jump: an almond branch, then a promise about God's word. In Hebrew it is a pun. The almond is šāqēḏ (שָׁקֵד). The verb the King James renders hasten is šāqaḏ (שָׁקַד), which means to watch, to be wakeful over. Same three consonants, different vowels. Jeremiah sees an "almond" and hears "watching": the LORD is watching over His word to perform it. It is a picture made to be remembered: a branch that says I am watching.

Why an almond branch could carry more than one meaning. The almond already belonged to Israel's sacred imagery. The menorah, the seven-branched lampstand that gave light in the tabernacle, had cups shaped like almond blossoms. Its branches and flowers brought the form of a living plant into the sanctuary (Exodus 25:31–37).

The almond also appears when Aaron's priestly authority is challenged. The leaders' rods are placed before the Lord, and Aaron's rod buds, blossoms, and produces almonds—a sign that God has chosen him. The Lord directs Moses to preserve it as a reminder of that choice (Numbers 17:1–10). An otherwise lifeless rod becomes a witness of God's power to bring forth life and confirm His appointed servant.

Jeremiah himself comes from a priestly family (Jeremiah 1:1). Read alongside these earlier passages, his almond branch can recall sanctuary light, life brought forth by God's power, and a calling confirmed by Him. These are meaningful scriptural echoes to explore alongside the explanation the Lord gives Jeremiah: He is watching over His word to fulfil it.

The verb comes back, and you can follow it. Its next use in the book is a hard one: "a leopard shall watch over their cities" (5:6). Watching can be a threat. Then, much later, the Lord uses it of Himself with the verbs of Jeremiah's commission: "like as I have watched over them, to pluck up, and to break down… so will I watch over them, to build, and to plant" (31:28). The same God who watched while things were torn down is watching to rebuild. Week 44 reads chapter 31.

What the translations did. Jerome kept the pun in Latin. He calls the branch virgam vigilantem, "a watching rod", and the Lord answers vigilabo, "I will watch" (Vulgate, Jeremiah 1). Swete's Greek keeps the meaning but not the sound: the branch is baktērian karyinēn (Βακτηρίαν καρυίνην), a staff of walnut, and the Lord says egrēgora (ἐγρήγορα), "I am awake" (Swete, Jeremiah 1).

Try this: read 1:11–12 aloud with watch where the King James has hasten. Then read 31:28. What is the Lord watching over in each?

Cross-Language Connections

The word appears in this week's best-known verse:

"For my people have committed two evils; they have forsaken me the fountain of living waters, and hewed them out cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water." (Jeremiah 2:13)

The fountain is māqôr (מָקוֹר), a spring or source. It appears in only four verses of Jeremiah, and the same noun names the LORD and the prophet's own eyes.

• In 2:13 the LORD is the "fountain of living waters" the people left.
• In 9:1 Jeremiah cries, "Oh that my head were waters, and mine eyes a fountain of tears, that I might weep day and night for the slain of the daughter of my people!" (Jeremiah 9:1). The people abandoned the fountain, and the prophet wishes he could become one, of tears.
• In 17:13 the title returns as a prayer: "they have forsaken the LORD, the fountain of living waters" (Jeremiah 17:13).
• The fourth use is far ahead, in a prophecy against Babylon: "I will dry up her sea, and make her springs dry" (51:36). The empire that seemed unstoppable has a source too, and it can fail.

What makes the water "living". The phrase living waters is two Hebrew words: māyim (מַיִם), water, and ḥayyîm (חַיִּים), living, the ordinary word for anything alive. Said of water, it means fresh, flowing water rather than water that stands still (BLB H2416). The King James shows this in other places where the same two words appear: they are "running water" in the law of cleansing (Leviticus 14:5), and the "living waters" that flow out from Jerusalem "in summer and in winter" in Zechariah's vision (Zechariah 14:8). So Jeremiah's first hearers heard a plain contrast: water that moves and stays fresh, and water that is caught and kept in a tank. The image does not claim that no spring on earth ever runs dry. It names the Lord as the living source, the opposite of the "waters that fail" Jeremiah feared at his lowest (15:18).

What the translations did. Swete's Greek uses one word for all three of this week's verses: pēgē (πηγή), spring, so a Greek reader hears the fountain of 2:13 again in the tears of 9:1 and the prayer of 17:13 (Swete, Jeremiah 2). It is also the word the Gospel of John uses for Jacob's well, where the Savior offered living water (John 4:6). The Latin uses fontem at 2:13 and 9:1, but at 17:13 it switches to venam aquarum viventium, "a vein of living waters" (Vulgate, Jeremiah 17). So the Latin loses the thread at the very verse where it comes back round to 2:13.

Key Passages, passage 2, traces the water image through the book (the empty pits of 14:3, the "waters that fail" of 15:18, the fountain of 17:13). This study traces the single Hebrew noun māqôr and what the translations did with it.

Cross-Language Connections

Read this sentence slowly:

"Return, ye backsliding children, and I will heal your backslidings." (Jeremiah 3:22)

In English, return and backsliding look like unrelated words. In Hebrew, the sentence turns on a single root three times:

• Return is the verb šûḇ (שׁוּב), the ordinary word for turning back.
• Backsliding children uses šôḇāḇ (שׁוֹבָב), "turning away".
• Your backslidings uses mᵊšûḇâ (מְשׁוּבָה), "turning away, apostasy".

Strong's Hebrew dictionary derives both nouns from the verb. They are one root, not one word: the same root that names turning toward God also names turning away from Him. The difference is only the direction you are facing. The Church's Scripture Helps puts the English plainly: "Backsliding refers to the people returning back to waywardness, faithlessness, or apostasy."

That is a hopeful way to hear the invitation: the turning that carried them away is the same motion that can bring them back. And the promise sits in the middle of the sentence: "I will heal."

The verb turns up in the potter's house too. When the clay is marred, the King James says the potter "made it again another vessel" (18:4). The Hebrew uses šûḇ (שׁוּב) there, in an idiom for doing something again: the potter, so to speak, returned to the clay. Key Passages, passage 6, reads that chapter.

What the translations did. Both ancient translations heard the echo. The Greek of 3:22 repeats one verb, epistrephō (ἐπιστρέφω), to turn: ἐπιστράφητε, υἱοὶ ἐπιστρέφοντες, "turn, you sons who are turning" (Swete, Jeremiah 3). Jerome's Latin keeps three members of one family, all built on vertere, "to turn": convertimini filii revertentes et sanabo aversiones vestras. That is turn, returning, and turnings-away (Vulgate, Jeremiah 3). At 18:4 the Latin even says conversusque fecit, "and turning, he made it" (Vulgate, Jeremiah 18).

Jewish teachers read 3:14 and 3:22 side by side as a lesson about repentance; see Jewish Perspective.

Cross-Language Connections

Chapter 20 is Jeremiah's lowest moment, and one Hebrew verb runs through it:

"Then I said, I will not make mention of him, nor speak any more in his name. But his word was in mine heart as a burning fire shut up in my bones, and I was weary with forbearing, and I could not stay." (Jeremiah 20:9)

The verb is yāḵōl (יָכֹל): to be able, to prevail, to overcome. In the verses this study follows, the King James translates it prevail five times (1:19; 15:20; 20:7, 10, 11) and could not once (20:9). It is also the verb in 5:22, where the sea's waves "toss themselves, yet can they not prevail" against the sand the Lord has set: a picture of the same kind of limit. Hear chapter 20 with that one word in mind:

• "thou art stronger than I, and hast prevailed" (20:7). God was able.
• "I was weary with forbearing, and I could not stay" (20:9). Jeremiah was not able to keep silent.
• "we shall prevail against him" (20:10). His enemies hope to be able.
• "they shall not prevail" (20:11). They will not be able.

The same verb carries the promise Jeremiah was given on the day of his call: "they shall fight against thee; but they shall not prevail against thee" (1:19; again at 15:20). So the question of the chapter is who is able. Jeremiah could not hold the word in. His enemies could not overcome him. The only one who "prevailed" over Jeremiah was the Lord.

A second verb runs alongside it. "Thou hast deceived me, and I was deceived" (20:7) and the enemies' hope that "he will be enticed" (20:10) translate one Hebrew verb, which Scripture Helps notes "can also mean 'enticed' or 'persuaded.'" Jeremiah uses of God the same word his enemies use of their trap. The difference is who is doing the persuading, and to what end.

What the translations did. The Greek is wonderfully consistent: it uses dynamai (δύναμαι), to be able, at 1:19, 15:20 and all four places in chapter 20, so a Greek reader hears every one. It also keeps the second link, using apataō (ἀπατάω), to deceive, both in 20:7 and in 20:10 (Swete, Jeremiah 20). The Latin scatters both threads. It has praevalebunt at 1:19 and 15:20, invaluisti at 20:7, non sustinens ("not enduring") at 20:9, praevaleamus at 20:10, and infirmi erunt ("they shall be weak") at 20:11. For the second verb it has seduxisti at 20:7 but decipiatur at 20:10 (Vulgate, Jeremiah 20). The King James keeps five of the six as prevail, which is why an English reader can still follow most of it.

Key Passages, passage 7, reads the whole prayer.

Cross-Language Connections

• Jeremiah 1:11–12, then 31:28. Read watch where the King James has hasten. What is the Lord watching over now, in your life?
• Jeremiah 2:13, 9:1 and 17:13. Mark fountain in all three. Who is the fountain, and who becomes one?
• Jeremiah 3:22. Say it aloud: return… backsliding… backslidings. One root, two directions. Which way are you facing this week?
• Jeremiah 20:7–11. Circle prevailed, could not, prevail and not prevail. Then read 1:19. Who turned out to be able?

Continue to Jewish Perspective.

This section listens in on Jewish teachers reading Jeremiah. All three passages come from the Talmud, the great collection of rabbinic discussion about scripture, law and life, which was compiled over several centuries after the time of Christ. The Talmud is written as a conversation: one rabbi asks a question about a verse, another answers, and often the answer is given in the name of an earlier teacher. Sometimes it quotes a baraita, an older teaching handed down from the early rabbis.

These are interpretations, not scripture, and they are not the only way Jewish readers have understood Jeremiah. They are worth reading because they ask sharp questions of verses we know well, and their questions often turn out to be our questions too.

English quotations are from the William Davidson Edition of the Talmud on Sefaria (CC BY-NC), which adds short explanations to the translation (for example, "i.e., immediately"). Each attribution links to the passage so you can read it in context. The rabbis sometimes number verses differently from the King James Bible; where that happens, both numbers are given.

Jeremiah 2:13 counts carefully: "my people have committed two evils." A rabbi named Rav Naḥman thought that was a strange number. Elsewhere scripture lists far more of Israel's sins. So he asked:

"Were there only two evils they performed? Were, then, the twenty-four violations listed in the book of Ezekiel abandoned, i.e., pardoned?"

— Talmud, Taanit 5a

Rabbi Yitzḥak answered in the name of Rabbi Yoḥanan:

"They have violated one transgression that is equivalent to two. And what is this sin? Idol worship."

— Talmud, Taanit 5a–5b

That is a striking way to read the verse. Forsaking the fountain and hewing the cisterns are not two separate sins. They are one act seen from two sides: turning from the true God and turning to a false one happen in the same motion. You cannot leave the spring without going somewhere else for water.

Then the Talmud quotes a baraita on the verses just before, where the Lord asks whether any nation has ever changed its gods (2:10–11):

"Kittites, i.e., the people of the isles of Kittim, worship fire and the people of Kedar worship water, and even though they know that water extinguishes fire, nevertheless they have not exchanged their god: 'But My people has exchanged its glory for that which does not profit.'"

— Talmud, Taanit 5b

The picture is almost humorous, and it is meant to sting. Two nations worship gods that cannot both be supreme, since one can put the other out, and still neither switches. Israel, who had the living God, did.

LDS Connection

Modern revelation names the same exchange in present-day terms. Describing people who "seek not the Lord to establish his righteousness," the Lord says "every man walketh in his own way, and after the image of his own god, whose image is in the likeness of the world, and whose substance is that of an idol" (Doctrine and Covenants 1:16). The rabbis' insight fits it well: an idol is rarely chosen instead of nothing. It is chosen instead of God. Key Passages, passage 2, follows the fountain and the cisterns through the book.

Jeremiah 3:22 is one sentence of invitation and promise: "Return, ye backsliding children, and I will heal your backslidings." The Talmud's long discussion of repentance in tractate Yoma uses it to make a remarkable claim. For a person who has failed to do something God commanded:

"If one violates a positive mitzva and repents, he is forgiven even before he moves from his place, i.e. immediately, as it is stated: 'Return, you backsliding children, I will heal your backsliding' (Jeremiah 3:22), implying that when one repents he is immediately forgiven."

— Talmud, Yoma 86a

(A mitzva is a commandment; a "positive" one is a command to do something. For other kinds of sin the Talmud describes forgiveness coming in stages, completed on the Day of Atonement or later, so this promise is precise, not general.)

Then a rabbi named Rabbi Ḥama bar Ḥanina noticed a tension inside Jeremiah 3. He read verse 14's "backsliding children" as calling the sin childish: in the Talmud's words, "an act of immaturity and foolishness" that "could be ignored as if it had never happened." Verse 22, though, promises to heal it, which implies a wound is still there. Which is it? His answer:

"Here, where everything is forgiven as if the Jewish people never sinned, it is referring to repentance out of love; there, where the sin is still remembered despite the forgiveness and repentance, it is referring to repentance out of fear."

— Talmud, Yoma 86a

And the page lifts its eyes at the end:

"Rabbi Levi said: Great is repentance, as it reaches the heavenly throne, as it is stated: 'Return, Israel, to the Lord your God' (Hosea 14:2)."

— Talmud, Yoma 86a

(That verse is Hosea 14:1 in the King James Bible: "O Israel, return unto the LORD thy God.")

LDS Connection

Two Latter-day Saint scriptures say the same two things, with Christ at their centre. Amulek, in the same sermon in which he testifies of the Savior's "great and last sacrifice" (Alma 34:10–14), promises that "if ye will repent and harden not your hearts, immediately shall the great plan of redemption be brought about unto you" (Alma 34:31). Immediately is the very word the Talmud's English translation uses to explain "before he moves from his place." And the Lord's promise in Doctrine and Covenants 58:42 reads almost like Rabbi Ḥama's "as if the Jewish people never sinned": "he who has repented of his sins, the same is forgiven, and I, the Lord, remember them no more."

Here the traditions differ in where they place the power. The rabbis speak of the greatness of repentance itself; Latter-day Saints locate it in the Atonement of Jesus Christ, which is what makes repentance reach the throne. But both hear Jeremiah 3:22 the same way: the healing is offered now, not after a long probation. Word Studies, study 3, shows how return and backsliding share one Hebrew root.

This week's title verse says God knew Jeremiah before he was formed (1:5). The Talmud has its own list of things that existed before the world began, and one of its proof texts comes from this week's reading:

"Seven phenomena were created before the world was created, and they are: Torah, and repentance, and the Garden of Eden, and Gehenna, and the Throne of Glory, and the Temple, and the name of Messiah."

— Talmud, Pesachim 54a

For the Throne and the Temple the Talmud cites Jeremiah 17:12, which the King James renders "A glorious high throne from the beginning is the place of our sanctuary." For repentance it cites Psalm 90: "Before the mountains were brought forth… Thou turnest man to destruction; and sayest, Return, ye children of men" (Psalm 90:2–3). Return there is the same Hebrew verb as Jeremiah's call in 3:22. So in this tradition, the way back to God was prepared before there was anyone to need it. For the name of Messiah it cites Psalm 72:17.

LDS Connection

Latter-day Saints will recognise the shape of this. Scripture speaks of "the plan of redemption, which was laid from the foundation of the world" (Alma 12:25), and Peter says of Christ that He "verily was foreordained before the foundation of the world" (1 Peter 1:20). The baraita's "name of Messiah" and Peter's foreordained Christ are reaching toward the same conviction: the remedy came before the need.

The difference is real, and worth naming plainly. The baraita's list is made of things, places and a name. It does not include human beings. Latter-day Saint scripture goes further: "Man was also in the beginning with God" (Doctrine and Covenants 93:29). That is why Latter-day Saints read "before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee" as knowledge of a person who already existed, not only of a plan. Key Passages, passage 1, explores that reading. Both traditions agree on something precious all the same: before anything went wrong, God had already prepared the way back.

These teachers are not part of the Latter-day Saint canon, but they model three good habits:

1. Ask the obvious question. Why two evils? Why does verse 22 heal what verse 14 seemed to excuse? Noticing a small puzzle in a verse is often how its meaning opens.
2. Read the verses around the verse. The Kittim and Kedar teaching only works because the rabbis read 2:10–11 beside 2:13.
3. Let differences stay visible. The Talmud's pre-creation list and the Restoration's teaching of premortal life share a hope and differ on who existed. Both can be held honestly.

Continue to Teaching Applications.

Choose the setting you are teaching in. Each activity starts with scripture and gives learners something to do or notice. The fuller explanations live in Historical & Cultural Context, Key Passages and Word Studies; there is no need to repeat them all in class. Several of this week's chapters touch tender things (birth, grief, marriage, despair), so each activity says plainly how to keep it safe.

The manual suggests an object lesson for Jeremiah 2:13, and it works well at home. Pour water into a cracked or leaky container and watch what happens. Then, if you can, drink from a drinking fountain or a running tap.

Read 2:13 together. Explain briefly what a cistern was: a pit cut into rock and plastered to store rain, which leaked if it cracked (Historical & Cultural Context, section 4). Ask: What is the difference between water you have to store and water that keeps coming?

Then read the Savior's words to the woman at the well: "the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life" (John 4:14).

Keep the point on the fountain, not on anyone's cracks. The lesson is where living water comes from. It is not a way to label any family member as "broken". Close by asking each person to name one way they "drink" from the Savior this week: prayer, scripture, the sacrament, serving someone.

Read Jeremiah 7:1–11 aloud. Make two columns on the board:

• What the people said: the slogan of verse 4; "We are delivered" in verse 10.
• What the Lord asked: the conditions of verses 5–7, which concern neighbours, strangers, the fatherless and the widow, innocent blood, and other gods.

Ask the class to fill both columns from the text. Then read Matthew 21:12–13 and notice whose words the Savior chose when He cleared the temple courts (Key Passages, passage 3).

Frame it carefully. This passage is not a reason to think less of the temple, or of worship. Jeremiah preached it at the temple, to people going in. The point is that worship and conduct belong together. Closing question: what helps you carry what you feel at church or in the temple into how you treat people on Monday?

The manual suggests showing a baby picture, perhaps of the children themselves, and asking where they lived before they were born. Sing "I Lived in Heaven" (Children's Songbook, 4). Then read Jeremiah 1:5 slowly: "Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee."

Ask: Who knew Jeremiah before he was born? Who knew you?

Keep the focus on being known and loved. Every child in the room was known by Heavenly Father before birth. Avoid any suggestion that a child's body, abilities, family or circumstances say something about what they did before they were born. The verse is a promise of love, not a measuring stick.

A second activity, from the manual: while you read Jeremiah 16:16, let children pretend to "fish" or "hunt" for objects around the room. Elder Russell M. Nelson, in 2006, compared the fishers and hunters to missionaries who search for scattered Israel (Key Passages, passage 4). Ask: How can we help someone find their way to Jesus?

If possible, show how pottery is thrown on a wheel; the manual suggests it, and a short video works. Then read Jeremiah 18:1–6.

Point out where the vessel is when it goes wrong: "marred in the hand of the potter" (18:4). It is still in his hands, and he starts again. Then read the people's answer in 18:12: "There is no hope." Ask: Why might someone say "there is no hope" at the very moment the Lord is offering to remake them?

Finish with 19:10–11, where a fired bottle is broken and "cannot be made whole again." Set the two vessels side by side and ask: What keeps a heart soft enough to be reshaped?

Do not ask anyone to share what is "marred" in their own life. Let the image do its work privately. Elder Hugh W. Pinnock's line, "we can take what we have marred and begin again," is a good one to leave on the board (Key Passages, passage 6).

Jeremiah's personal laments are some of the most honest prayers in scripture. Divide the class to read one each of the six laments: 11:18–12:6; 15:10–21; 17:9–10, 14–18; 18:18–23; 20:7–12; and 20:14–18 (Key Passages, passage 7, explains where the list comes from). Ask: What does Jeremiah say to God that we are often afraid to say? What does God say back?

Then read 20:9–13 together. A man who wanted to stop speaking for God found he could not, and then sang. Week 34 taught how the Psalms give grief its words; that teaching applies here too (see Week 34's Teaching Applications, section 2).

Handle two passages with special care:

• 20:14–18, where Jeremiah curses the day he was born, is a cry of despair. Read it with compassion and never turn it into a game or a hook. If someone in the room is in that kind of darkness now, the most faithful response is to listen, to stay close, and to help them find support.
• 18:21–23, where Jeremiah asks God to punish his enemies, is recorded honestly. Scripture keeps it; it does not ask us to pray it.

Chapter 16 asks Jeremiah not to marry, not to mourn and not to feast, as a sign of the losses coming to Jerusalem (Historical & Cultural Context, section 7). Some people in any class are unmarried, childless, recently bereaved, or unable to be with family in grief.

Say clearly that this was asked of one prophet, for one terrible moment. It is not a teaching about marriage, family or mourning for anyone else. Do not use it as an activity. If you teach it, teach it as what it cost Jeremiah to carry God's message, and then move to the hope of the same chapter: the second exodus and the gathering (16:14–16).

Read four verses in order: 1:9, 5:14, 15:16, 20:9. The Week Overview explains how they form one story.

Then write a short answer to this question: What has God's word been doing in me, even in weeks when I did not feel it? Elder Jeffrey R. Holland's account of 20:9 (Key Passages, passage 7) is a good companion. Read 15:16 again, where Jeremiah says the words "were found, and I did eat them," and choose one verse to take in slowly this week, the way he describes.

Continue to Study Questions.

These twenty questions move from what the text says to what it might mean for you. Choose a few that fit your study. Personal questions are invitations, not assumptions about anyone's faith, family or circumstances. Fuller explanations are in Key Passages, Word Studies and Historical & Cultural Context.

1. Read Jeremiah 1:4–10. What four things does the Lord say He did before Jeremiah was born? What is Jeremiah's objection, and what does the Lord give him in answer?
2. In Jeremiah 2:13, what are the two evils? Why does the verse count them separately?
3. Read Jeremiah 7:2–7. Where is Jeremiah standing, and what conditions does the Lord attach to the promise "I will cause you to dwell in this place"?
4. In Jeremiah 16:14–16, what event will the new gathering be compared with, and who will the Lord send to find His people?
5. Read Jeremiah 20:7–13. What does Jeremiah decide in verse 9, and why can he not keep his decision?

1. Compare Jeremiah 17:5–8 with Psalm 1:3. What does Jeremiah's tree face that the psalm's tree does not mention, and what does that add?
2. Read Jeremiah 18:1–12, then 19:10–11. How does the difference between soft clay and a fired bottle shape the meaning of each chapter?
3. With Word Studies, study 3, read Jeremiah 3:22 aloud. How does knowing that return and backsliding share a root change the way the invitation sounds?
4. Circle prevail and could not in Jeremiah 20:7–11, then read 1:19. Using Word Studies, study 4, explain who turned out to be "able" in chapter 20.
5. Read Jeremiah 7:10–11, then Matthew 21:12–13. What does the image of a robbers' den say about how the people were using the temple, and why might the Savior have chosen these words?

1. Jeremiah said, "I cannot speak: for I am a child" (1:6). What calling, conversation or responsibility have you felt unready for? What did the Lord offer Jeremiah that He might offer you?
2. What does a "broken cistern" look like in an ordinary week: something good you might be asking to hold more than it can? What would it mean to go back to the fountain?
3. The people at the temple gate trusted a slogan. What helps you keep worship and the way you treat people joined together?
4. Read Jeremiah 15:16. Jeremiah says the Lord's words "were found, and I did eat them." Which verse could you take in slowly this week, the way he describes?
5. Jeremiah's prayers in chapter 20 move from complaint to praise to despair. What do they teach about bringing your real feelings to God? (This is an invitation to reflect, not a request to share anything private.)

1. Read Jeremiah 1:5 with Abraham 3:22–23 and Alma 13:3. What do the Restoration scriptures add to Jeremiah's call? Why does Alma mention being "left to choose good or evil"?
2. Compare Jeremiah 17:5 with 2 Nephi 4:34. What does it add to know that Nephi's family carried "many prophecies… of Jeremiah" on the brass plates (1 Nephi 5:13)?
3. Read Jeremiah 17:10, then Revelation 2:23. What comfort is there in knowing that the One who searches the heart is the Savior?
4. Jeremiah 16:15 speaks of a gathering "from the land of the north," and Doctrine and Covenants 110:11 uses the same phrase. How are you part of that gathering?
5. Read the four verses of the Week Overview's "One Thread to Follow" (1:9; 5:14; 15:16; 20:9). The Lord who put His words in Jeremiah's mouth is the same Lord who says "Return… and I will heal" (3:22). What is He offering you this week?

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