Jeremiah 34:18
And I will give the men that have transgressed my covenant, which have not performed the words of the covenant which they had made before me, when they cut the calf in twain, and passed between the parts thereof, And I will give the men that have transgressed my covenant, which have not performed the words of the covenant which they had made before me, when they cut the calf in twain, and passed between the parts thereof,
Jeremiah 34 belongs to the historical section covering the two years before Jerusalem fell. The verse describes a covenant made before God that was ratified by cutting a calf in two, laying the parts apart, and passing between the pieces. The same custom is described as dividing the sacrificial animal into two halves with both contracting parties passing between them.
The act carried a solemn imprecation that the covenant parties deserved to be killed like the divided victim if they violated the agreement. In Zedekiah's day the covenant was a covenant of liberty under the law of release, not observed since Moses' time, by which the people agreed to free servants and others who were oppressed, enslaved, or in debt, but then reneged. The verse declares God's judgment on the transgressors who failed to keep the words of the covenant: he would give them into the hands of their enemies. That judgment was fulfilled in Jerusalem's destruction by Nebuchadnezzar and in the destruction and captivity of the state, with oppression of the laboring classes as a principal charge against them.
The covenant recalls the covenant God made with Abraham before Israel became a nation, described in Genesis 15:10-16, which God still held in force 1,323 years later and treated as recent. The passing between the pieces in Zedekiah's day shows that Abraham himself had passed between the pieces when God made the covenant with him, so that Abraham's descendants were included in that covenant. By contrast, the going of both parties between the divided animal marks a true mutual covenant, unlike the promise to Abraham where God alone passed through in the form of cloud, smoke, and fire while Abraham was only a passive spectator.
Abraham's divided animal sacrifices are explained by this practice as a sign of God's covenant of liberty with him, and the liberty represented is freedom from the bondage of sin through Christ, the great Sacrifice. The chapter shows that Israel's owning of slaves was never pleasing to God and violated the moral law. It belonged to special laws granted to the Jews for a limited time because their manners and morals were corrupted and their hearts were hard, not to the lasting moral law nor to the typical system, and when Jesus came with greater light he set such permissions aside and brought every act strictly to the test of God's moral law.