The fathers shall not be put to death for the children, neither shall the children be put to death for the fathers: every man shall be put to death for his own sin.
The fathers shall not be put to death for the children. God, the sovereign author and proprietor of life, may, in certain circumstances, command this penalty; but the rule was addressed for the guidance of earthly magistrates, and it established the equitable principle that none should be responsible for the crimes of others, and that impartial justice should be blended with mercy in all their decisions.
This law had a special reference to the commission of idolatry, which was not only a sin against God, but a crime against the state; and as treason in many of the most civilized states is punished both by the death of the offender and also by the confiscation of property, which involves his family in poverty and degradation, so God, as the King of the Israelite nation, declared it to be a principle in His providential procedure to visit this "iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation" (see the note at Exodus 20:5). In carrying this principle into execution, human tribunals frequently err on the score of excessive severity; but in the Jewish state it was applied with unerring justice. 'For the Deity,' says Dr. Warburton ('Divine Legation,' b.
v., sec. 5), 'though He allowed capital punishment to be inflicted for the crime of less majesty on the person of the offender, by the delegated administration of the law, yet, concerning his family or posterity, he reserved the inquisition of the crime to Himself, and expressly forbade the magistrate to meddle with it in the common course of justice' (see the note at 2 Kings 14:6; also Graves' 'Lectures on the Pentateuch,' 2:, pp. 240, 241).