Free Study Guide IncludedJeremiah: A Friends Illuminated Commentary
The weeping prophet who confronted false religion and spoke of the new covenant written on the heart — the passage most quoted by early Friends when explaining what made Quakerism different from all other Christianity.
- 52 chapters · ~75,000 words
- EPUB + Study Guide
This edition
Read itE-book · EPUB
- Time to read2.5 hours
- Length36,317 words
- Files1 EPUB, DRM-free
How we get 2.5 hours
This figure is here so you can compare one book against another. Every title on the site is timed from its own word count at the same reading speed — nothing is adjusted book by book — so if this edition says 2.5 hours and another says half that, the second one really is about half the reading. It is a measure of size, in the way a page count is. Your own pace is your own: at the speeds typical adult readers actually manage, this edition runs anywhere from 2 hours to 3.5 hours.
What is in this edition
| Modernized text | 36,317 words |
|---|---|
| Total | 36,317 words |
Counted from the text of the EPUB you receive. Navigation, the title page, the table of contents and the licence page are excluded — they are packaging, not reading.
The reading rate
238 words per minute, for adult silent reading of non-fiction, applied unchanged to every title on the site. We did not pick the number; it is the pooled result of a published meta-analysis. Nothing is adjusted book by book — that consistency is what makes two of these figures worth comparing.
Brysbaert, M. (2019). How many words do we read per minute? A review and meta-analysis of reading rate. Journal of Memory and Language, 109, 104047. doi:10.1016/j.jml.2019.104047
190 studies, 18,573 participants.
The same paper puts most adult readers between 175 and
300 words per minute, and those two speeds give the
2 hours and 3.5 hours above.
Because time is words divided by speed, an even range of speeds produces an
uneven range of times, so 2.5 hours sits nearer the fast end of that
range than the middle of it.
If it were a paperback
Roughly 104–145 pages.
Words per printed page is a typesetting convention, not a measurement — it moves with trim size, type size and leading. The range above assumes 250–350 words a page. Friends Illuminated publishes no print edition of this book; the figure is here only because pages are a more familiar size than words.
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About This Edition
No biblical passage was more central to early Quaker self-understanding than Jeremiah 31:31–34: the promise of a new covenant in which God’s law would be written not on tablets of stone but on the human heart, and in which no one would need to say to their neighbor “know the Lord” because all would know him directly. Friends believed this prophecy had been fulfilled — that the day of the new covenant had arrived, and that the direct, unmediated knowledge of God that Jeremiah described was what they had themselves experienced. This commentary explores that conviction in depth, tracing how early Friends read Jeremiah as both promise and fulfillment.
The commentary also engages with the harder edges of Jeremiah’s prophecy: his lamentation over false prophets who cry “peace, peace” when there is no peace, his costly fidelity when it brought him imprisonment and near death, and his extraordinary prayers of complaint to God — the passages sometimes called Jeremiah’s “confessions.” Friends found in these passages a model of prophetic integrity that demanded both personal cost and public witness. The free Group Study Guide provides structured questions for exploring these themes in community.
