A Leopard Can't Change Its Spots & Jeremiad

And if thou say in thine heart, Wherefore come these things upon me? For the greatness of thine iniquity are thy skirts discovered, and thy heels made bare.
Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots? then may ye also do good, that are accustomed to do evil.

-- Jeremiah 13: 22-23 (KJV)

Once again, the Lord is fuming over the sins of Judah and Jerusalem, and once again he has chosen a prophet to predict vengeance -- which will arrive when Babylon conquers the kingdom and sacks the Jerusalem temple.

The warnings, accusations, and condemnations occupy a long series of chapters. On top of these Jeremiah adds his own complaints against his society, which are so bitter and proved
so unpopular that we've coined the word "jeremiad" -- meaning "lamentation" or "tirade" -- in his honor. The term first appeared in 1780, when Hannah More accurately observed that "It has long been the fashion to make the most lamentable Jeremiades on the badness of the times." There's certainly never been a lack of social critics with dire views of the state of affairs -- people President George H. W. Bush fondly referred to as the "doom and gloom crowd."

Jeremiah, however pessimistic, did have a way with words. Here he's in the middle of rebuking those who would presume to object when God rightly punishes them for their pride, drunkenness, and assorted other sins. (Among other things, the Lord will "discover their skirts," which doesn't mean that he'll rummage through their closets, but rather that he will tear off their clothing, in other words strip them of their defenses.)

God, whom Jeremiah now quotes, doesn't offer them much hope of escape, for he sees that their evil is dyed in the wool. With one powerful rhetorical question -- "Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots?" -- he justifies his forthcoming punishments on the grounds that these sinful Jews are incorrigibly perverse. The leopard never questions the rightness of his appearance, just as these people, schooled in sin, are complacent in their evil. Just as a leopard can't change his spots, neither can they suddenly do good. Which of course puts Jeremiah's whole enterprise in question -- why warn them if they're already doomed?

"A leopard can't change its spots" is now the regular form of the proverb, though in its source it is phrased as a question. P. G. Wodehouse's Bertie Wooster got this much right when, apropos of an unmanageable young monster named Master Thomas, he noted, "Once a Thos., always a Thos. Can the leopard change his spots or the Ethiopian his what-not?" (Very Good Jeeves, 1930).

 
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Michael Macrone is Associate Site Producer of GraceCom and the author of nine books on language, literature, and ideas, including the best-selling Brush Up Your Shakespeare!