Epigenetics
yet He will by no means leave the guilty unpunished, inflicting the punishment of fathers on the children and on the grandchildren to the third and fourth generations.” Exodus 34:7b NASB
Inflicting – I like the NASB. I use it as my standard English Bible text. But in this verse, the translation couldn’t be worse! There is simply no justification in Hebrew to use “inflicting” for the verb pāqad. As I have mentioned before, pāqad is about oversight, not retribution.
The basic meaning is to exercise oversight over a subordinate, either in the form of inspecting or of taking action to cause a considerable change in the circumstances of the subordinate, either for the better or for the worse.[1]
You will note “for better or for worse.” In other words, the outcome is conditional, but the action isn’t. God oversees. What that means is determined by the circumstances. When the NASB translates this verb as “inflicting,” it has already determined that the outcome will be worse. In the NASB’s version, God is after revenge. He will balance the scales by making the children pay for the fathers’ sins.
But, of course, this isn’t biblical at all! The prophets specifically tell us that offspring are not judged according to the sins of the fathers and that no man can bear the sins of another. Furthermore, the primary defining characteristic of God’s own self-description is compassion (Exodus 34:6), not judgment. The NASB translation solves a problem that the Bible doesn’t; namely, what about those wicked people who seem to get away with it. The Bible says nothing about how God will deal with them, but Greek philosophy does. According to the Greeks, either the children pay or the wicked are judged in the next life. Since the Tanakh directly tells us the children do not pay, and it says nothing about reward and punishment in another life, it took rabbinic thinking and Greek Hellenism to conclude that the scales would be balanced in the afterlife. To translate pāqad from a Greek perspective does violence to this text.
However . . . there is a sense in which we can understand God’s oversight that does have ongoing repercussions. It’s the Golden Calf syndrome.
“The notion, that the effects of sin, as well as its punishments, will be diffused over many generations, may imply a kind of suspension of the full gravity of the law. Or it may suggest that a residue of that failure will linger forever. It is somehow endemic to human nature, even if only in the quasi-scientific measure of an onki, an alchemically minute quantity of Calf-substance that ferments in all generations.”[2]
God’s oversight doesn’t remove our propensities, nor erase our consequences. Sin alters DNA. Epigenetics is real. We do pass something on. Fortunately, God watches.
Topical Index: epigenetics, sin, punishment, inflict, pāqad, oversight, Exodus 34:7b
[1] Harris, R. L., Archer, G. L., Jr., & Waltke, B. K. (Eds.). (1999). Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament (electronic ed., p. 731). Chicago: Moody Press.
[2] Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, The Hidden Order of Intimacy: Reflections on the Book of Leviticus (Schocken Books, 2022), p. xiii.
