Jeremiah and David, Two Singers of One Covenant

The prophet and the king rarely appear together in Jewish tradition. David sings; Jeremiah weeps. David builds; Jeremiah watches things fall. David is the warrior-poet who dances before the ark; Jeremiah is the reluctant prophet who wishes he had never been born. They seem to occupy opposite ends of the emotional and historical spectrum of the Hebrew Bible.

The rabbis of the Midrash noticed that they were saying the same thing.

The Warning Against Boasting

Jeremiah 9:23-24 is one of the most quoted verses in rabbinic literature: "Let not a wise man boast of his wisdom, let not the mighty man boast of his might, let not a rich man boast of his riches; but let him who boasts boast of this, that he understands and knows Me, that I am the Lord who exercises lovingkindness, justice, and righteousness on earth, for I delight in these things."

This is Jeremiah in his characteristic mode: stripping away every false foundation. Wisdom, might, wealth: the three pillars of human achievement, the things that powerful people and nations point to as evidence of their superiority. Jeremiah tells Israel that none of these are worth boasting about. The only thing worth boasting about is knowing God, and knowing God is demonstrated not by theological sophistication but by the practice of lovingkindness, justice, and righteousness in the ordinary human world.

In Midrash Tehillim 89:1, the rabbinic commentary on Psalm 89, this same warning is traced backward to David. The psalm begins with the words of Eitan the Ezrahite, who declares "the mercies of the Lord I will sing forever." The rabbis identify this Eitan with a figure of exceptional wisdom, and they read his declaration as the right answer to Jeremiah's warning: if you are going to sing of anything, sing of God's chesed, lovingkindness. That is the one form of boasting that does not collapse.

Who Was Eitan the Ezrahite?

The attribution of Psalm 89 to Eitan the Ezrahite is puzzling. Eitan appears in 1 Kings 5:11 as one of the wisest men in Israel, surpassed only by Solomon. He is a figure of legendary intellectual achievement, and yet his psalm begins with an act of intellectual surrender: he sings not of what he knows but of what God does. The wisest man turns out to be the one who most clearly sees the limits of his wisdom.

The Midrash Tehillim commentary plays on his name, Eitan, which can be read as meaning 'ancient' or 'permanent.' This reading connects to the rabbinic theme of primordial creation: the things that were created before the world, the Torah, the throne of glory, the messianic name, repentance. Eitan's wisdom is permanent not because of his own intellect but because he aligned himself with what was permanent before the world began.

The connection to David is through the Davidic covenant that is the central subject of Psalm 89. After the initial declaration of God's eternal lovingkindness, the psalm moves into God's promise to David: "I will establish your seed forever and build up your throne to all generations" (Psalm 89:5). Eitan is singing about a promise made to someone else, a future he will not live to see. He is boasting about God's faithfulness rather than his own attainment. This is Jeremiah's advice, performed three centuries before Jeremiah gave it.

The Creation Context

Psalm 89 does not stay with the Davidic covenant. It expands to cosmic scale: "The heavens are Yours, the earth also is Yours; as for the world and its fullness, You have founded them" (Psalm 89:12). The eternal promise to David is nested inside an eternal claim about creation itself. God's faithfulness to David is an expression of the same faithfulness that holds the created order together.

The Zohar, compiled in Castile, Spain around 1290 CE, develops this connection through the concept of the divine attribute of chesed, lovingkindness, as the foundational force of creation. Everything that exists does so because God's generosity sustains it moment to moment. The world is not a mechanical system running on its own; it is an ongoing act of divine giving. Jeremiah's command to boast of knowing God, and Eitan's declaration of singing God's lovingkindness forever, are both pointing at this same reality: lovingkindness is not a virtue alongside other virtues but the condition of existence itself.

Bereshit Rabbah, the Midrash on Genesis compiled in the land of Israel around the 5th century CE, opens with the observation that the Torah begins with the letter bet, the second letter of the alphabet, because creation was an act of generosity: God did not have to make the world, and having made it, God sustains it through continuous giving. The bet is open on one side: the world pours out of divine generosity. The letter that closes on itself, aleph, comes first in the alphabet but second in the text, because the kind of divine unity that is closed in on itself cannot generate a world. Only the open letter can.

Why Jeremiah Wept and David Sang

Jeremiah lived through the destruction of the First Temple in 586 BCE. He had spent decades warning Israel that the destruction was coming if they did not return to justice and lovingkindness, the very qualities he cites in the verse about not boasting. They did not return. The destruction came. And Jeremiah sat in the ruins and wrote Lamentations, which is pure grief without comfort, the counterpart to Psalm 88's pure darkness.

David, writing centuries earlier, also knew grief. The Psalms attributed to him include some of the most anguished poetry in the Hebrew Bible: pursued by enemies, betrayed by friends, abandoned by God in the darkness. But David's grief always turns. Even at the bottom of Psalm 22, "My God, my God, why have You forsaken me," the turn comes, and the psalm ends in praise. Jeremiah's grief in Lamentations is closer to Psalm 88: the darkness without the turn.

The rabbis in the Legends of the Jews, Ginzberg's monumental compilation published between 1909 and 1938, preserve a tradition that David composed Psalms to cover every possible human situation, including situations he had not yet experienced, precisely so that future sufferers would have language ready. He was singing for Jeremiah's generation, among others. The prophets came and named what the poets had already written music for.

Singing Lovingkindness When There Is Nothing Else

Eitan's declaration, "the mercies of the Lord I will sing forever," is easy to dismiss as conventional piety until you place it in its historical context. Psalm 89 ends, after all the praise of God's faithfulness and the celebration of the Davidic covenant, with a devastating reversal: the king has been defeated, the crown thrown to the ground, the covenant apparently broken. "But You have rejected and spurned; You have been very wrathful against Your anointed" (Psalm 89:39). The psalm that celebrated God's eternal lovingkindness ends with the apparent failure of everything it celebrated.

Eitan sings "I will sing forever" at the beginning of a psalm that ends in defeat. That is not naive optimism. It is the same structure as Psalm 88: honest about the darkness, directed toward God, trusting that what God promised is more permanent than what human eyes can currently see. Jeremiah's warning against boasting of wisdom, might, and wealth makes sense here. Wisdom, might, and wealth all failed. The only thing that holds through the defeat is the singing itself, offered to a God whose lovingkindness the psalm insists is older than the cosmos and will outlast the defeat of every king.