Jeremiah: A Friends Illuminated Commentary

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.