Jeremiah and the New Paradigm of the Gathering
This page is our own summary. The original belongs to BYU Religious Studies Center; please read it there.
A BYU scholar explains Jeremiah’s prophecy that the latter-day gathering of Israel would one day eclipse the Exodus as the great sign of God’s power.
In this short Religious Educator article (vol. 9, no. 1, 2008), Ray L. Huntington, then an associate professor of ancient scripture at BYU, looks at one of Jeremiah's bold prophecies: that the latter-day gathering of Israel would one day outshine even the Exodus as the great evidence of God's power. It is a useful companion to this week's Come, Follow Me reading in Jeremiah, which speaks of the Lord gathering His people again.
The Exodus as the old benchmark
Huntington notes that ancient writers used the Exodus to build faith in God. Nephi reminded Laman and Lemuel of it when they mocked his shipbuilding (1 Nephi 17), and Psalms 105–106 and Habakkuk 3 praise God for those miracles, crediting Him rather than Moses or Joshua.
Jeremiah's paradigm shift
In Jeremiah 16:14–15 the Lord says the day will come when people no longer speak of the God who brought Israel out of Egypt, but of the God who brought Israel "from the land of the north, and from all the lands whither he had driven them." Huntington reads this as the latter-day gathering becoming the new benchmark.
How the gathering surpasses the Exodus
He gives three reasons:
- Scale: the gathering reaches all nations, with "fishers" and "hunters" searching every hill (Jeremiah 16:16), echoed by Isaiah, Ezekiel and Micah.
- Permanence and blessings: unlike ancient Israel's repeated scattering, the restored kingdom will stand forever (Daniel 2:44; Amos 9:15), and faith will rest on covenants and the Spirit rather than visible signs such as the ark (Jeremiah 3:16).
- The Book of Mormon: Isaiah's image of the Lord "hissing" to gather Israel and Ezekiel's joining of the sticks of Joseph and Judah point to the Book of Mormon as the instrument of gathering, as President Ezra Taft Benson taught.
How we wrote this: we read the source page linked above and summarized it in our own words, quoting at most a short line with attribution. We have not added facts from outside that source. If anything here differs from the original, the original is correct.