Jeremiah 5:3

'O LORD, do not your eyes look for truth? You have struck them down, but they felt no anguish; you have consumed them, but they refused to take correction. They have made their faces harder than rock; they have refused to repent' — the verse voices Jeremiah's bewilderment at the failure of divine discipline to produce repentance. The escalating description of Judah's hardness — no anguish, no correction, faces harder than rock — parallels the Deuteronomic catalogue of divine disciplinary measures met with persistent rebellion (Amos 4:6–11). The phrase 'faces harder than rock' (hizqu peneyhem miselah) echoes Ezekiel's description of the prophet commissioned to a people with hard faces and stubborn hearts (Ezekiel 3:7–9). The verse reflects the theological problem at the heart of the prophetic movement: why does encounter with the holy God, even through severe judgment, not invariably produce transformation — a question that shapes both Jeremiah's new covenant theology and Paul's anthropology in Romans 7.