The pairing with Parashah Mishpatim, whose opening laws set out the terms under which a Hebrew slave must be released after six years of service, rests on a direct legal match: the haftarah's entire crisis turns on this exact law, cited by Jeremiah as the ancient covenant Zedekiah's generation briefly honored and then violated once the emergency that had prompted their compliance appeared to pass.
Where the parashah presents the law in its original, straightforward form, a fixed term of service followed by release, the haftarah shows how easily such a law can be honored only under duress and abandoned the moment convenience returns, giving the abstract legal instruction of Mishpatim a concrete, cautionary illustration of exactly how it can fail in practice even after it has technically been fulfilled once.
The haftarah's closing reassurance that God's covenant with Jacob and David cannot be broken, unlike the slaveholders' own broken covenant, draws a pointed contrast between human faithfulness to a specific, testable law and divine faithfulness to a much larger promise, suggesting that the very people condemned for breaking one covenant can still rely on God's unbroken commitment to another.