Can a Nubian change his skin,
/ a leopard its spots? This formulation— in traditional translations, kushi
is rendered as “Ethiopian”—expresses a profound moral pessimism: just as these
bodily features are ineradicable, your propensity for evil will never change,
and so a national catastrophe is inevitable. (Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible,
3 vols. [New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019], 2:906)
