Stop Covering Your Ears

27 July 2026 

“But they did not listen.” (Jeremiah 13:11)  

The business strategy of the antebellum American South was to sell raw cotton to textile mills in Britain and the northern states, and then buy it back in the form of clothing for more than they sold it for. As if that were not foolhardy enough, they had to buy all their tools, furniture, and luxury goods from the British and northern states, too, along with much of their food, like corn and pork from the west. This amounted to a debt trap because all southern wealth was tied up in non-liquid assets like land and slaves. To pay their debts to British and northern mills and banks, southern planters sold slaves. Some states, like Virginia, raised cash by breeding slaves and selling them to cotton plantations in the deep South. Human property became Virginia’s most profitable export, bringing more money into the state than any other commercial sector. It is understandable, therefore, that when southerners in general, and Virginians in particular, began complaining in the 1860s that their “freedom” and “rights” were being violated by “northern aggression,” many in Britain and the northern states scoffed at the South’s glaring hypocrisy, how their genteel plantations and refined entertainments amounted to a thin cover for slave-breeding and human trafficking.

The strong, family-unfriendly language of the prophets was not a first choice, but a last, desperate choice to get through to a people who “did not listen” (13:10).

Rather than acknowledge that, the South decided to fight the most destructive war in American history to preserve it.

It was hypocrisy on this scale that persuaded Jeremiah to use decidedly ungenteel metaphors to make his point to the kingdom of Judah that just didn’t get it. He was called by God to take his underwear to a place by the Euphrates River (where the nation of Judah would later be exiled) and put it in the cleft of a rock. A while later he was told to go and retrieve it, now rotted and stinking, and wear it in front of the people: “This wicked people…shall be like this loincloth, which is good for nothing” (Jeremiah 13:10). Later in the same chapter, Jeremiah is even more graphic: “Your skirts are lifted up, and you are violated” (13:22). Judah is as scandalous as a hooker at a garden party, turning tricks on the floor by the punch bowl; and if any in Judah complain about the prophet’s coarseness, well, they are part of the problem. They neither see nor understand what they have become. Judah is not the embarrassed hostess of the garden party, but the hooker by the punch bowl, having made peace with foreign gods, building altars and sacred groves for them right inside Jerusalem.

No doubt language like this will be uncomfortable to some, perhaps many, who may think, even if they don’t say, “Well, he didn’t have to say it that way.” It is likely that Jeremiah didn’t want to say it that way either, any more than he wanted to be a prophet for over 40 years who was never heeded, any more than he wanted to be flung into a cistern full of mud for telling the truth about what was about to happen to Judah (38:4-6), any more than he wanted to be dragged off to Egypt against his will, and persecuted there by his fellow Jews (43:5-7). He wasn’t called the “weeping prophet” for nothing. The strong, family-unfriendly language of the prophets was not a first choice, but a last, desperate choice to get through to a people who “did not listen” (13:10).

The witness of scripture is that gentle language is often inadequate to break through barriers caused by subbornness and sin. Prophets and martyrs are never the first choice. There is a reason that the central sign of our religion is the cross – it is God finally bellowing his message to a people determined to cover their ears.