What Does Jeremiah 13:23 Mean?
Can the Ethiopian turn his skin, or the leopard his spots? Then you also can do good, you who are trained to do evil.
Key words are shown with the Hebrew or Greek and what each word meant.
Selah Decoded Version The Selah Decoded Version renders what the Hebrew and Greek words meant to the people who first heard them.
King James wording
King James Version
Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots? then may ye also do good, that are accustomed to do evil.THE KEY
The verse compares evil habit to unchangeable markings, yet calls that habit learned.
THE MEANING
The Ethiopian’s skin and the leopard’s spots stand for what cannot be changed by sheer will. Beside them, the verse places a person so trained in evil that doing good seems just as impossible. It speaks to the reader about how deeply a practiced way can shape what feels possible now.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
It unsettles the belief that a destructive way is simply an unchangeable nature: the verse calls it learned, even as it shows how firmly that learning can take hold.
THE ROOT
לִמֻּדֵי
limmudei
GROWS FROM
למד
L-M-D
to learn, teach, or train
The word translated “accustomed” carries the sense of being trained or taught in evil. English can make the condition sound like a fixed kind of person; the Hebrew points to a way learned so deeply that it now feels fixed, like skin or spots.
ALSO GROWS
lamad: to learn or be taught
לָמַד
The verb makes learning the hidden process beneath the person’s present way of acting.
limmud: one who is taught or trained
לִמּוּד
This related form echoes the verse’s description of people shaped by repeated practice.
talmid: student or disciple
תַּלְמִיד
This later Hebrew branch preserves the root’s sense of a person formed through learning.
THE PATTERN
Repeated practice trains perception and action until a way feels natural.
Thus says the LORD, Learn not the way of the nations, and do not be shattered by the signs of heaven, for the nations are shattered by them.It is good for me that I am bowed low, so that I may learn your statutes.But firm food is for the complete, for those who through practice have their senses exercised to sift good from evil.THE THREAD
Thus says the LORD, Learn not the way of the nations, and do not be shattered by the signs of heaven, for the nations are shattered by them.Jeremiah uses the same root, למד (lamad, “learn” or “be taught”), in “Learn not the way.” That shared root opens “accustomed” as a learned way of life: deeply ingrained, yet described through the language of training.
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