In Jer 1:5, we read the following (structured showing the parallelism of the passage):
Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee;
and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee,
and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations.
and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee,
and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations.
This is perhaps the main biblical "proof-text" Latter-day Saints use in support of the doctrine of pre-existence (i.e., that everyone, not just Jesus, personally pre-existed). Unfortunately, some Latter-day Saint authors tend to go overboard with this verse as if this provides explicit biblical proof of the doctrine. Note the following representative example:
In A Marvelous Work and a Wonder (p. 39), LeGrand Richards wrote that:
Jeremiah could not have been so called and ordained before he was born if he did not exist
However, the verse does provide implicit support for the doctrine.
Some critics of the LDS interpretation have argued that this passage is only referring to an allusion to ordination in the womb. While this is possible for the second line of the verse, it does not work for the first line of the verse.
The adverbial "before" (Heb: בְּטֶ֙רֶם) is to be understood temporally, therefore, the nature of God's "knowledge" of Jeremiah was not just before birth, it was before the body was formed in his mother's womb, as in the first line, so the calling of Jeremiah and his ordination as a prophet was before Jeremiah's biological conception.
While not definitive, Jer 1:5 does provide some implicit support for the Latter-day Saint understanding of universal pre-existence, something that is explicated in the revelations given to the Prophet Joseph Smith (e.g., D&C 93; Abraham 3).
Notwithstanding, the best argument in favour of the doctrine would be Christological. I make the argument in the following article:
