Can the Ethiopian Change His Skin
15 Hear, and give ear. Don’t be proud, for Yahweh has spoken. 16 Give glory to Yahweh your God, before he causes darkness, and before your feet stumble on the dark mountains, and while you look for light, he turns it into the shadow of death, and makes it deep darkness. 17 But if you will not hear it, my soul will weep in secret for your pride. My eye will weep bitterly, and run down with tears, because Yahweh’s flock has been taken captive. 18 Say to the king and to the queen mother, “Humble yourselves. Sit down, for your crowns have come down, even the crown of your glory. 19 The cities of the South are shut up, and there is no one to open them. Judah is carried away captive: all of them. They are wholly carried away captive. 20 Lift up your eyes, and see those who come from the north. Where is the flock that was given to you, your beautiful flock? 21 What will you say when he sets over you as head those whom you have yourself taught to be friends to you? Won’t sorrows take hold of you, as of a woman in travail? 22 If you say in your heart, “Why have these things come on me?” Your skirts are uncovered because of the greatness of your iniquity, and your heels suffer violence. 23 Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots? Then may you also do good, who are accustomed to do evil. 24 “Therefore I will scatter them as the stubble that passes away by the wind of the wilderness. 25 This is your lot, the portion measured to you from me,” says Yahweh, “because you have forgotten me, and trusted in falsehood.” 26 Therefore I will also uncover your skirts on your face, and your shame will appear. 27 I have seen your abominations, even your adulteries and your neighing, the lewdness of your prostitution, on the hills in the field. Woe to you, Jerusalem! You will not be made clean. How long will it yet be?”
Judah is urged to give glory to God before nightfall catches it on the mountains, and is then told that its habit of evil has gone as deep as skin color.
The appeal is timed rather than argued: give glory to Yahweh before he causes darkness, and before your feet stumble on the dark mountains. Anyone who had walked hill country knew the picture. Light in that terrain does not fade gradually. It goes, and a traveler caught out is not lost but stopped, unable to move without falling. The urgency in the verse is therefore about a window rather than about severity. That is the same argument the ended harvest made two chapters earlier Jeremiah 8:20.
The address then narrows to two people — the king and the queen mother, told to sit down because their crowns have come down. The queen mother held real standing in that court, and the pairing is not rhetorical. A king and his mother were in fact taken to Babylon together in one of the deportations 2 Kings 24:15. Between the two verses stands one of the book's quiet lines. If they will not hear, the prophet's soul will weep in secret for their pride. He is announcing the fall of a dynasty and grieving over it privately at the same time.
The question the people ask when it happens is anticipated — Why have these things come on me? — and the answer given is not an argument but an exposure, the imagery of a woman publicly shamed. The passage is deliberately hard to read. What it refuses to do is let the fall be received as a mystery, and the reason it refuses is that the question is asked in the tone of the innocent by people the book has documented at length.
Then the sentence everyone remembers: can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots? The expected answer is no, and the application is exact — then may you also do good, who are accustomed to do evil. The word is the point. This is not a claim that the people were made evil. It is a claim about habituation, a practiced pattern so long established that it now functions like something congenital. That distinction matters for the whole book. A merely inherited nature could not be blamed, while a learned one can be, and neither can be reversed by trying harder. The chapter ends without a remedy and with a question left hanging: You will not be made clean. How long will it yet be? The answer is not given here. It waits for a covenant that changes the heart rather than the conduct Jeremiah 31:33.
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