Hebrews 8:13 Beside Jeremiah

By now some readers may be growing impatient. “All right,” they say, “Jeremiah says ‘My Torah.’ But Hebrews says the first covenant is growing old and fading away. Would God take a law that is growing old and fading and put it back into anyone’s heart? Never. The Hebrew word may be the same, but the meaning is not. What He writes on the heart is something new.”

This is a thoughtful objection. It takes Hebrews 8:13 seriously, and it is right that the verse says something is growing old. It also admits honestly that the word in Jeremiah is Torah, and argues only that the word has taken on a different meaning.

Two questions therefore need answers. Can the same word carry a different meaning here? And what exactly does Hebrews say is growing old?

A Word With a History

We begin with the word. The verse Hebrews quotes is Jeremiah 31:33:

Jeremiah 31:33 For this is the covenant (berit בְּרִית ber-eeth') that I will cut with the house of Israel after those days, declares the LORD: I will put My Torah within them, and on their heart I will write it; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people.

The Hebrew is torati תּוֹרָתִי to-raw', “My Torah.” That is the word God chose for what He would write on the heart.

Words do not arrive empty. Before a reader reaches chapter 31, Jeremiah has already used this word again and again, and he goes on using it afterward; every time it points to the same thing. Here is one example from later in the book:

Jeremiah 44:10 They have not been crushed even to this day, and they have not feared, nor walked in My Torah, nor in My statutes (chuqqot חֻקָּה khook-kaw'), that I set before you and before your fathers.

The Torah that God “set before you and before your fathers” is the Torah of Sinai. Jeremiah uses the word the same way well before chapter 31: “as for my Torah, they have rejected it” (Jeremiah 6:19); the fathers “did not keep my Torah” (Jeremiah 16:11); “walk in My Torah that I have set before you” (Jeremiah 26:4). In Jeremiah, “My Torah” is the Torah God gave His people and they failed to keep. When the same prophet, in the same book, says “I will put My Torah within them,” nothing at all signals that he has switched to something else.

As the last chapter showed, Ezekiel says the same thing in different words: God will cause His people to walk in His statutes (chuqqim חֹק khoke) and keep His judgments (mishpat מִשׁפָּט mish-pawt') (Ezekiel 36:27), the very words the Torah uses to name its own commandments.

What Hebrews Did Not Add

Consider next how Hebrews quotes Jeremiah: “I will put my nomoi νόμοι nom'-os(laws) into their dianoia διάνοια dee-an'-oy-ah(thought), and write them on their kardiai(hearts, soul-domains)” (Hebrews 8:10).

Hebrews renders the word with the Greek nomoi (νόμοι), “my nomoi(laws),” and then moves on. It does not add a single sentence saying that “my nomoi(laws)” here means something different from what it meant in Jeremiah. No such line is there.

Think of a will. A father writes, “I leave my house to my son.” Years later, someone argues in court that “house” in the will does not mean the house on Elm Street but some other house the father never named. The judge would ask one question: where does the will say so? If the document does not redefine the word, nobody else may redefine it.

The same principle is written into the Torah:

Deuteronomy 4:2 You shall not add to the word which I am commanding (tzivvah צָוָה tsaw-vaw') you, and you shall not take away from it, to keep the commandments (mitzvah מִצוָה mits-vaw') of the LORD your God which I am commanding (tzivvah) you.

To read the same word with a different meaning, the Bible itself would have to say so somewhere. If no such verse exists, the new meaning is not something we found in the text but something we added to it.

What Is Growing Old

The second question turns on the verse the claim is built on:

Hebrews 8:13 In speaking of a new diatheke διαθήκη dee-ath-ay'-kay(covenant), He makes the first one obsolete; and what is obsolete and growing old is ready to vanish away.

Two words carry the weight. “Obsolete” is palaioo παλαιόω pal-ah-yo'-o, to make old. “Growing old” is gerasko γηράσκω ghay-ras'-ko, to age, the word one would use for a person getting on in years. Something is aging, and the question is what it is.

Hebrews 8 ends at verse 13, and Hebrews 9 opens by telling us:

Hebrews 9:1 Now even the first diatheke(covenant) had regulations for worship and an earthly holy place.

“Regulations for worship and an earthly holy place” are what the writer turns to the moment he finishes the words “growing old.” He then goes straight on to describe them: the tent, the lampstand, the table, the inner room, and the high priest who entered once a year with blood.

The rest of the letter makes the same point in three ways. The first is the priesthood:

Hebrews 7:12 For when there is a change in the priesthood, there is necessarily a change in the nomos νόμος nom'-os(law) as well.

The second is the sanctuary: “Messiah appeared as high priest of the good things to come, through the greater and more perfect tent not made with hands” (Hebrews 9:11).

The third is the sacrifices:

Hebrews 10:8-9 When He said above, "Sacrifices and offerings and burnt offerings and sin offerings you did not desire nor were you pleased with them" — these are offered according to the nomos(law) — then He added, "Behold, I have come to do your thelema θέλημα thel'-ay-mah(will), O God"; He does away with the first in order to establish the second.

The first, in this passage, is the offerings “offered according to the nomos(law)”; the second is the will of God that Messiah came to do.

What changes in Hebrews is the priesthood, the sanctuary, and the sacrifices, and these are what grow old.

Three Verses Apart

Hebrews 8:10 and 8:13 stand three verses apart in the same chapter, and they should be read side by side.

Verse 10: “I will put my nomoi(laws) into their dianoia(thought), and write them on their kardiai(hearts, soul-domains).”

Verse 13: “What is obsolete and growing old is ready to vanish away.”

If “my nomoi(laws)” were the thing growing old, verse 13 would cancel verse 10, and God would be promising to write on His people’s hearts the very thing He was about to make vanish. The writer says nothing of the kind. His laws are not on the side that grows old; they are what the new covenant is made of.

The claim, then, has the right verse and the wrong subject. Something in the first covenant was growing old: its regulations for worship, its earthly holy place, and the priesthood that served there. What God promised to write on the heart was His Torah, and the prophet who made that promise had used the word throughout his book for the Torah set before the fathers.

One more story is often told to set grace and the Torah against each other, and it reaches back before Sinai. God, it is said, was patient with Israel all the way to the mountain, and became angry only after the law was given. The road from Egypt to Sinai is short enough to walk in a single chapter.