The Fathers Have Eaten Sour Grapes

Whatever else a generation hands on, it also hands on the bill, and the receiving generation gets no vote. Judaism did something with that fact which almost no tradition does: it recorded the argument and kept both sides inside its own canon.

The old formula is in the divine attributes proclaimed at Sinai, and again twice in the Decalogue. Then, in the exile, it is revoked. Ezekiel opens his eighteenth chapter by quoting a proverb the exiles were evidently using about themselves, and answers it flatly. Jeremiah has the same proverb and the same reversal, with one difference worth noticing: Jeremiah puts the change in the future, they shall say no more, while Ezekiel asserts it in the present.

Several details are usually flattened, and each of them matters.

Exodus 20:5 and Deuteronomy 5:9 both carry the qualifier of them that hate me. Exodus 34:7 does not. This is a difference in the Hebrew rather than an artifact of translation, and it is the hinge of the entire harmonising reading. Anyone presenting the three verses as one formula has erased the thing scholars actually argue about.

The famous asymmetry preached from Exodus 34 — punishment for three or four generations, mercy for a thousand — depends on which translation is in hand. The Hebrew la-alafim is genuinely ambiguous between thousands of people and thousands of generations. JPS 1917 reads the thousandth generation; the King James reads thousands. The asymmetry is only in the first.

And nineteen chapters after Deuteronomy 5:9, the same book forbids exactly that transfer in capital cases. The text offers no reconciliation. The usual move is to say that 5:9 describes divine action while 24:16 legislates for human courts — but that distinction is supplied by readers, not drawn by the book in its own voice.

The tradition's own commentary states what it takes itself to have done. Makkot 24a preserves Rabbi Yose ben Hanina's account: Moses pronounced adverse sentences on Israel, and prophets came and revoked them; Moses said visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and Ezekiel came and declared that the soul that sins, it shall die. No public-domain English of the passage was available for this page, so it is described here rather than quoted.

It would be neater to say the tradition simply changed its mind, and neatness would be a lie. Readers have held these texts together in at least four incompatible ways: that the clause only ever bit on descendants who continued the wickedness, which is where Rashi, Rashbam, Ibn Ezra and Radak are placed; that it describes divine action while human law forbids the same; that the whole framing is corporate rather than individual, with the modern academic caution that reading Ezekiel 18 as the birth of individualism is anachronistic; and that Ezekiel simply overruled Moses. Each has serious people behind it. What is not in dispute is that a tradition preserved, inside its own canon, the record of arguing with itself about whether children inherit their parents' debts — and then preserved the memory of that argument as an argument. That is a more useful inheritance than a settled doctrine would have been.

One citation hazard for readers following along. Jeremiah 31 is numbered one verse apart between the Christian and Hebrew traditions: the revocation is 31:29–30 in the King James and 31:28–29 in Hebrew numbering.