Jeremiah 9:25-26

9:25 The Lord says, “Watch out! ¹  The time is soon coming when I will punish all those who are circumcised only in the flesh. ²  9:26 That is, I will punish the Egyptians, the Judeans, the Edomites, the Ammonites, the Moabites, and all the desert people who cut their hair short at the temples. ³  I will do so because none of the people of those nations are really circumcised in the Lord’s sight. ⁴  Moreover, none of the people of Israel ⁵  are circumcised when it comes to their hearts.” ⁶ 

Jeremiah 13:23

13:23 But there is little hope for you ever doing good,

you who are so accustomed to doing evil.

Can an Ethiopian ⁷  change the color of his skin?

Can a leopard remove its spots? ⁸ 

[9:25]  ¹ tn Heb “Behold!”

[9:25]  ² tn Heb “punish all who are circumcised in the flesh.” The translation is contextually motivated to better bring out the contrast that follows.

[9:26]  ³ tn Heb “all those who are cut off on the side of the head who live in the desert.” KJV and some other English versions (e.g., NIV “who live in the desert in distant places”; NLT “who live in distant places”) have followed the interpretation that this is a biform of an expression meaning “end or remote parts of the [far] corners [of the earth].” This interpretation is generally abandoned by the more recent commentaries and lexicons (see, e.g. BDB 802 s.v. פֵּאָה 1 and HALOT 858 s.v. פֵּאָה 1.β). It occurs also in 25:33; 49:32.

[9:26]  ⁴ tn Heb “For all of these nations are uncircumcised.” The words “I will do so” are supplied in the translation to indicate the connection with the preceding statement.

[9:26]  ⁵ tn Heb “house of Israel.”

[9:26]  ⁶ tn Heb “And all the house of Israel is uncircumcised of heart.”

[13:23]  ⁷ tn This is a common proverb in English coming from this biblical passage. For cultures where it is not proverbial perhaps it would be better to translate “Can black people change the color of their skin?” Strictly speaking these are “Cushites” inhabitants of a region along the upper Nile south of Egypt. The Greek text is responsible for the identification with Ethiopia. The term in Greek is actually a epithet = “burnt face.”

[13:23]  ⁸ tn Heb “Can the Ethiopian change his skin or the leopard his spots? [Then] you also will be able to do good who are accustomed to do evil.” The English sentence has been restructured and rephrased in an attempt to produce some of the same rhetorical force the Hebrew original has in this context.