The Sins of the Fathers

Orestes pursued by Erinyes.

“You shall no t make for yourselves an idol, nor any image of anything that is in the heavens above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth: you shall not bow yourself down to them, nor serve them, for I, Yahweh your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children, on the third and on the fourth generation of those who hate me…”

Note this second part of the first or second commandment, depending on how you parse them. That makes it near the core of the Judeo-Christian message. It says that children and grandchildren are punished for a parent’s or grandparent’s sin.

Indeed, you get the same idea in the doctrine of original sin. Or that of redemptive suffering. One person can suffer for the sin of another.

And it is troubling: how can an all-loving God be so unjust? How can he punish Tom for Jerry’s sin?

Nevertheless, we have to accept that this is a fair description of reality. All of us either suffer or benefit from actions of our ancestors; these inform the circumstances of our birth and upbringing. Since God could intervene to prevent this, he is ultimately responsible.

But there must be more to this, too.

For this then is a case of God taking direct responsibility for human sin. Which is not theologically correct. We have free will.

And if a parent is morally depraved, it is probably not going to change their mind to hear that their children will suffer for it. That would trouble only a good person. In fact, this is what a narcissistic parent actually wants and tries to do. They inevitably choose one or more children as a scapegoat, and blame and punish them without cause. Most often, they are innocently punished for the very things of which the parent is guilty. That is what “scapegoat” means.

So it seems both false and fruitless for God to declare this commandment to the bad. And after all, if they are idolators—the specific sin which this commandment prohibits—they are not listening to God in the first place.

Nor to the already righteous parents, who care about their children. They are, after all, already righteous, and listening to God, not worshipping idols.

It has to be that he is speaking to someone else.

It has to be that he is speaking to the children. He is speaking to the grown children of the iniquities of their fathers.

Children, especially less thoughtful children, get their worldview and many of their unexamined opinions from their parents. Denominational beliefs, politics, and prejudices of all kinds run in families for generations. This is demonstrated often in demographic surveys, were it not self-evident. In our earliest years, our parents are the font of all knowledge; and this assumption never entirely fades.

Yet we all also have an innate conscience, from God, and must be conscious as well of contradictions, between this and what our parents taught us. And we all have a moral duty to actively seek the True and the Good.

It is perhaps vitally significant that this passage comes at the end of the prohibition against idolatry.

The essential and most dangerous idolatry may be this idolatry of the parent; and what Francis Bacon called “the idols of the tribe.”

The word translated here as “iniquity” is actually closest to the English “crookedness.” It is an image of a thing being bent.

That indeed makes it plausible that it refers to a distorted, dishonest world-view.

And it seems to bookend with Jesus’s condemnation in the New Testament of those who would “cause one of these little ones to stumble.” It is a condemnation of parents who fail in their children’s moral education.

One can see, then, how this commitment to sin is both passed down from the parent, and a matter of personal responsibility. We all have the moral obligation to see past such idolatries—this is what the commandment is telling us. If in an oddly oblique way, as if aware of the necessity at the same time not to upset the authority of the family—the foundation of all social order.

Happily, this conflict between God and parent is not great in most families. However, one can easily see in it the basis for original sin. Every human ancestor must, like Adam, fall somewhat short.

A similar concept of guilt running in families was known to the ancient Greeks. See, most obviously, the Oresteia trilogy: it ends in a formal trial, in which by the grace of Athena the parent is found at fault, and the child not guilty. Plato too speaks of ancestral curses for which a descendant must atone, through bouts of “divine madness” and through rituals of purification.

Plato is referring to melancholy, which is much of what we call mental illness; or at least to depression and mania (now “bipolar disorder”). In the Oresteia, the same experience is represented by pursuing Furies. This, depression, then seems to be a product of the dissonance between parental influence and eternal verities.

But those raised by a narcissistic parent who do not suffer through the ordeal remain in sin. They have broken the first commandment.