Does God punish children for their parents’ sins, or does each person bear his own guilt?

Exodus 20:5 ends with words that are often left out: the iniquity is visited to the third and fourth generation “of them that hate me”, while mercy is shown to thousands “of them that love me” (verse 6). The children in view are those who carry on their parents’ hatred of God, here the idolatry the commandment forbids; sin and its punishment run on in a family when each generation repeats it. The ancient Aramaic paraphrase, the Targum Onkelos, already read it this way: it speaks of ‘rebellious children’, ‘when the children go on sinning after their fathers’. When a son sees his father’s sins and does not do likewise, Ezekiel says, “he shall surely live” (18:14–17).

Deuteronomy 24:16 is a law for human judges: no court in Israel might execute anyone for a relative’s crime, and 2 Kings 14:6 shows a king keeping it. Ezekiel 18 answers a proverb of the exiles, “The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge” (18:2), with which they blamed their ancestors for their own plight; God replies that every person answers for his own life. Isaiah 14:21 is a taunt-song over the tyrant king of Babylon: his royal house is to be cut off, so that his heirs “do not rise, nor possess the land” and carry on his conquests. That is a judgment on a dynasty, not a rule for courts.

So children often suffer the consequences of their parents’ sins, but no one stands guilty before God for another person’s sin.

Consequences for a nation

Many see Exodus 20:5 as covenant language about Israel as a nation: when the nation turned to idols, later generations lived with the results, as the exiles lamented, “Our fathers have sinned, and are not; and we have borne their iniquities” (Lamentations 5:7). Yet the same poem confesses, “woe unto us, that we have sinned!” (5:16).