TEXT [Commentary]

  B.   The New Covenant (8:7-13)

7 If the first covenant had been faultless, there would have been no need for a second covenant to replace it. 8 But when God found fault with the people, he said:

“The day is coming, says the LORD,

when I will make a new covenant

with the people of Israel and Judah.

9 This covenant will not be like the one

I made with their ancestors

when I took them by the hand

and led them out of the land of Egypt.

They did not remain faithful to my covenant,

so I turned my back on them, says the LORD.

10 But this is the new covenant I will make

with the people of Israel on that day,[*] says the LORD:

I will put my laws in their minds,

and I will write them on their hearts.

I will be their God,

and they will be my people.

11 And they will not need to teach their neighbors,

nor will they need to teach their relatives,[*]

saying, ‘You should know the LORD.’

For everyone, from the least to the greatest,

will know me already.

12 And I will forgive their wickedness,

and I will never again remember their sins.”[*]

13 When God speaks of a “new” covenant, it means he has made the first one obsolete. It is now out of date and will soon disappear.

NOTES

8:7 the first covenant. The original text has only “the first” (or more precisely, “that first”). The NLT has quite properly supplied “covenant” from the phrase “better covenant” in the preceding verse. “First covenant” is a neutral expression, in contrast to Paul’s pejorative phrase “old covenant” (2 Cor 3:14), yet Hebrews finally agrees with Paul that the “first” covenant is in fact “old” (8:13) in the sense of being “obsolete” and “out of date.” The issue carries over to today, when some purists propose referring to the so-called “Old Testament” as the “First Testament” or “Hebrew Bible” in order to avoid the precedent set by Paul and the writer of Hebrews.

no need. More precisely, “no place would have been sought” (NIV)—“place” (topos [TG5117, ZG5536]) in the sense of occasion or opportunity (as in 12:17, NRSV: “no chance to repent”; see BDAG 1012).

8:8 found fault with the people. Other mss (א* A D* I 044 33 it cop) read, “found fault with them” (autous [TG846, ZG899]), referring to “the people of Israel and Judah” (see NRSV, NIV). Other mss (46 א2 B D2 0278 1739 M) have “found fault when he said to them” (autois [TG846, ZG899]), allowing for the interpretation in the NLT.

God . . . he said. The NLT supplies “God” as the speaker of the whole quotation (8:8-12). This creates a certain redundancy in that the phrase “says the LORD” (legei kurios [TG3004/2962, ZG3306/3261]) occurs three times within the quotation itself (8:8, 9, 10). Is “God” quoting “the LORD”? For this reason, it is tempting to translate more literally, “But finding fault . . . it said” (meaning “the Scripture said”). “Finding fault,” however, seems to imply a personal subject, suggesting that the redundancy is implicit already in the original text (see NRSV, NIV). For a similar instance of God speaking about God, see 1:7 (“Regarding the angels, he says, ‘He sends his angels like the winds,’” italics mine; see note).

The day is coming. Rather, “days are coming.” The text is not looking at one catastrophic “day of the Lord” but at a new era, a new order of society, and a new way of worship.

8:10 this is the new covenant I will make. Lit., “this is the covenant (diathēkē [TG1242, ZG1347]) that I will covenant (diathēsomai [TG1303, ZG1415]).” This construction, in which the noun and the verb are from the same root, gives emphasis to the pronouncement and is characteristic of Hebrew style (see 9:16-17; also Acts 3:25). For the verb, “to covenant” or “make a covenant,” see also Luke 22:29-30, “And just as my Father has granted me (dietheto [TG1303, ZG1415]) a Kingdom, I now grant you (diatithemai [TG1303, ZG1415]) the right to eat and drink at my table in my Kingdom.” This comes just a few verses after Luke 22:20, where Jesus promised his disciples a “new covenant” (kainē diathēkē [TG2537/1242, ZG2785/1347]).

on that day. Lit., “after those days” (that is, after the days of unfaithfulness mentioned in the preceding verse). Here again (see note on 8:9), the text contemplates an ongoing new relationship, not a single transforming “day.”

8:11 their neighbors . . . their relatives. Here, as elsewhere, the NLT renders singular nouns and pronouns (“each . . . his neighbor,” etc.) as plurals for the sake of inclusive language. But “relatives” is a bit weak for the Greek adelphos [TG80, ZG81]; it would be better translated, “their brothers and sisters.” Also, “neighbors” (politēs [TG4177, ZG4489]) is better rendered as “fellow citizens” or “compatriots.” The more common word for “neighbor,” plēsion [TG4139A, ZG4446], is a weakly-supported variant reading.

8:13 will soon disappear. Lit., “near to destruction” (see BDAG 155). The language hints at divine judgment, as in 6:8 (“will soon condemn that field and burn it”; see note).

COMMENTARY [Text]

After a brief introductory statement about the failure of the first covenant, the writer provides a quotation from Jeremiah 31:31-34 (or according to the LXX, Jer 38:31-34), in which God announces “a new covenant with the people of Israel and Judah” (8:8). “I will put my laws in their minds,” he promises, “and I will write them on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people” (8:10), and “I will forgive their wickedness, and I will never again remember their sins” (8:12). These, it seems, must be the “better promises,” and this “new covenant” must be the “far better covenant” of which the author had just spoken (8:6).

This is in fact the case, but the author was not quite ready to make it explicit. Instead, he turned the glowing promises from Jeremiah into an occasion for fault finding (8:7-8). His use of Scripture is as surprising here as in chapters 3 and 4, where he turned God’s vehement oath that “they will never enter my place of rest” (Ps 95:11) into a promise of rest and an eternal “Sabbath observance” for his audience (see 4:9-11). He does the opposite here, transforming a joyful promise of a “new covenant” (8:8) into evidence that God’s former covenant with Israel is over. He does this by singling out just one word, “new” (kainē [TG2537, ZG2785]), from the phrase “new covenant,” leading him to the conclusion that “when God speaks of a ‘new’ covenant, it means he has made the first one obsolete. It is now out of date and will soon disappear” (8:13).

The “fault” in that first covenant had to do not with the terms of the covenant itself (which were, after all, God’s terms) but with “them” (see note on 8:8), that is, with an unfaithful people (8:9, “They did not remain faithful to my covenant”). Just as for Paul the “weakness” of the law was not in the law itself but in the inability of God’s people to keep the law (see Rom 8:3), so for this author the “fault” of the law, or “first covenant,” lay in the failure of the people—or at least their ancestors—to obey it (8:9). He had spoken before, and at some length, about those ancestors, whom “Moses led out of Egypt,” yet who “made God angry for forty years,” and “because of their unbelief they were not able to enter his rest” (see 3:16-19). They were still on his mind when he cited Jeremiah’s prophecy of a “new covenant with the people of Israel and Judah,” a day when, God says, “I will put my laws in their minds, and I will write them on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people” (8:8, 10).

Ironically, these strong words of hope pass without comment. Instead, the author mourned the “first” covenant, now grown old and obsolete, soon to “disappear” like the generation that fell in the desert long ago (8:13). Yet he is not speaking negatively of the Jewish Scriptures, which have come to be called the Old Testament. On the contrary, he makes his case largely on the basis of the Jewish Scriptures. And as for the explicit vision of a “new covenant” in Jeremiah 31, that speaks for itself within the text of Hebrews and in one sense needs no comment. The very phrase “new covenant” is richly evocative to any Christian reader today, and may have been to the original readers of Hebrews, as well. Jesus told his disciples at their last meal, “This cup is the new covenant between God and his people—an agreement confirmed with my blood” (1 Cor 11:25; also Luke 22:20). However, when the author of Hebrews goes on to associate this “new covenant” with “the blood of Christ” (9:14-15; see also 10:29; 12:24; 13:20), he gives no hint that he is thinking either of Jesus’ words at the Last Supper or of the Lord’s Supper as practiced in the congregation to which (or from which) he is writing. Just as he ignores the offering of bread and wine when recounting Melchizedek’s encounter with Abraham (7:1-2; see Gen 14:18), so he ignores the Eucharist when speaking of a “new covenant.” But is this because he knows of no connection to the Eucharist or because the connection is so familiar and obvious to him and his audience that it does not have to be spelled out? At this point there is no way to be certain.

Except for the single phrase “new covenant” (9:15), the author does not pick up any of the language of the Jeremiah quotation until 10:16-18, where he telescopes the midpoint (“this is the new covenant I will make”; 8:10; see 10:16) and the ending of the text as cited here so as to accent its final words, “and I will never again remember their sins” (8:12b; see 10:17). While he does not repeat the words just preceding, “and I will forgive their wickedness” (8:12a), they were obviously on his mind when he adds the comment that “when sins have been forgiven, there is no need to offer any more sacrifices” (10:18). There the author finally confirms what the audience has known already from the Jeremiah quotation itself—that the “new covenant” of which the prophet spoke is a positive and not a negative thing, promising nothing less than the forgiveness of sins.

In retrospect, from the vantage point of 10:16-18, the audience will be able to see that the entire section from 8:7 through 10:18 has been one long exposition of the crucial passage in Jeremiah, even though the author seems to have wandered far from the actual language of that text. Most importantly, the exposition will by that time have developed the point that forgiveness in the “new covenant” (as in the old) is possible only through the shedding of blood.