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Messianic Prophecies

Jeremiah 31:22

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Jeremiah 31:22

How long will you go here and there, you backsliding daughter? For Yahweh has created a new thing in the earth: a woman will encompass a man.”

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There is hope for your latter end,” says Yahweh. “Your children will come again to their own territory.

“I have surely heard Ephraim grieving thus, ‘You have chastised me, and I was chastised, as an untrained calf. Turn me, and I will be turned; for you are Yahweh my God.

Surely after that I was turned. I repented. After that I was instructed. I struck my thigh. I was ashamed, yes, even confounded, because I bore the reproach of my youth.’

Is Ephraim my dear son? Is he a darling child? For as often as I speak against him, I still earnestly remember him. therefore my heart yearns for him. I will surely have mercy on him,” says Yahweh.

“Set up road signs. Make guideposts. Set your heart toward the highway, even the way by which you went. Turn again, virgin of Israel. Turn again to these your cities.

How long will you go here and there, you backsliding daughter? For Yahweh has created a new thing in the earth: a woman will encompass a man.”

Yahweh of Armies, the God of Israel, says: “Yet again they will use this speech in the land of Judah and in its cities, when I reverse their captivity: ‘Yahweh bless you, habitation of righteousness, mountain of holiness.’ Judah and all its cities will dwell therein together, the farmers, and those who go about with flocks. For I have satiated the weary soul, and I have replenished every sorrowful soul.”

On this I awakened, and saw; and my sleep was sweet to me.

“Behold, the days come,” says Yahweh, “that I will sow the house of Israel and the house of Judah with the seed of man and with the seed of animal.

The counter-reading

How this passage is read within its own context.

The critical reading emphasizes that Jeremiah 31:22 is among the most obscure verses in the Hebrew Bible, its sense debated for centuries without consensus. Its key verb is assigned by the standard lexica (BDB, HALOT) to the root savav, "to surround, encompass, go around," and is not defined as "conceive" in any standard Hebrew lexicon, so the clause is normally rendered "a female surrounds/encompasses a male" rather than "a virgin conceives." Proposed meanings include a reversal of gender roles, a metaphor for Israel returning to YHWH, and military imagery, with no settled interpretation. On this account, applying the verse to a virgin birth imposes a specific sense on a text whose meaning conservative and critical scholars alike acknowledge as uncertain.

The fulfillment reading

How this passage is read as pointing to the Messiah.

On the messianic-fulfillment reading, Jeremiah 31:22 announces a genuinely unprecedented act of divine creation — a "new thing" on the earth — expressed in a deliberately enigmatic clause about a female encompassing a male. Proponents locate the verse within the restoration and new-creation context of Jeremiah 30-31 (the "Book of Consolation") and take that framing to point toward a miraculous divine intervention. They read the obscure wording as prophetic mystery that becomes clear only in retrospect, and they align it with the virgin conception narrated in Matthew 1:18-20. On this view the unprecedented novelty of the oracle matches the unprecedented nature of a conception without a human father.

How the New Testament uses this passage

Each entry names how the New Testament author draws on the passage — a direct quotation, an allusion, an echo, or a typological reading. An echo or an allusion is not the same as a prediction; the label says which is which.

  • Matthew 1:18-20 Not cited by the New Testament

    Matthew 1:18-20 (and its fulfillment citation at 1:22-23, which quotes Isaiah 7:14) does not quote or allude to Jeremiah 31:22; the link to Jeremiah is a later interpretive association, not any NT use of this OT text.