Joshua took Achan the [grand]son of Zerah, along with the silver and the cloak and the wedge of gold [which he had taken illegally] and his sons and his daughters and his ox and his donkey and his flock and his tent and everything that was his. He brought these, along with all the Israelites, to the Valley of Achor. And Joshua said: “Just as you have brought disaster [‘achor] upon us, so will the LORD bring disaster upon you this day.” Then all the Israelites stoned him. They then burned them in a fire and stoned them with stones. They then raised a great pile of stones over him [which remains] to this day. Then the anger of the LORD subsided. (Josh 7:24–26)
It does not matter if this incident ever took place (it seems to most scholars to be designed to explain why the Valley of Achor—“Disaster”—is so called).5 But the narrator apparently saw no problem with Achan’s sons and daughters and domestic animals being burned alive and stoned for something they did not do. In fact, what is so interesting for our subject is that “they” and “he” seem to be used interchangeably in the last three sentences. It is as if the narrator assumes that Achan’s offspring and possessions are an extension of his own person—as if they are not individuals in our sense, but expressions of a single, collective existence.6
This is hardly an isolated case. In the story of Dinah (Genesis 34), Simeon and Levi avenge their sister’s rape by tricking the men of Shechem into undergoing mass circumcision, which was apparently performed on all the males in a single day.7
On the third day [after this], when they were all in great pain, Simeon and Levi, two of Jacob’s sons and [full-]brothers of Dinah, each took his sword and came upon the city [Shechem] unawares, and killed all the males. They killed Hamor and his son Shechem [the rapist] at sword-point; then they took Dinah out of Shechem’s house and went away. The other sons of Jacob then fell upon the corpses and plundered the town, since they had defiled their sister. They seized their flocks and herds and donkeys; everything that was inside the town and outside it they seized. All their wealth and their children and their wives they took as prisoners—all that was in the houses they took as prisoners and booty. (Gen 34:25–29)
Jacob later reproves his sons for creating strife between him and the neighboring Canaanites (Gen 34:30), but he says nothing about the unfairness of killing all the males of Shechem to avenge a single man’s act of rape. As for Jacob’s sons then seizing the Shechemite women (now widows) and children—no ancient reader needed to be told what this meant: the women would become household slaves, many of them no doubt raped at will, and the town’s children would likewise be enslaved for life. But what were they guilty of? Again, however, the most interesting thing about this passage is its maintaining that the town was plundered “since they [the men of Shechem] had defiled their sister”—where “they” should really refer to a single individual. Was there any reason to believe that all the townsmen, or even any subgroup thereof, had participated in that crime? Or does this tale, like the Achan narrative, seem to presume that relatives and neighbors can quite naturally be assimilated into a single collective personality of the perpetrator and therefore suffer collective punishment?
In another famous incident, the wicked Jezebel, wife of King Ahab, arranges to have Naboth killed so that Ahab can expropriate Naboth’s prized vineyard (1 Kings 21). Naboth is accordingly framed and stoned to death. This story has a moral lesson, however: Elijah informs Ahab that God is aware of his crime and has ordained his punishment: “In the place where dogs licked up the blood of Naboth, dogs will lick up your blood as well” (1 Kgs 21:19). Hearing this, Ahab “humbled himself,” exchanging his regular clothing for sackcloth and fasting,8 and God took notice:
Then the word of the LORD came to Elijah the Tishbite: “Have you seen how Ahab has humbled himself before Me? Because he has humbled himself before Me, I will not bring disaster in his lifetime. I will bring the disaster on his family in his son’s time.” (1 Kgs 21:29)
Clearly, there is some distinction here between Ahab and Ahab’s son (Jehoram): God’s promise to visit Ahab’s punishment on his son is presented as a lightening of his sentence. But what did Jehoram do?! He is apparently considered something like a limb of his father’s body, to be lopped off at some future date and thus punishing Ahab in such a way as to allow him to continue living. But wasn’t Jehoram a separate person?9
The same question might be asked of God’s punishment of David after his sin with Bathsheba (2 Samuel 11). David’s act of adultery with her, and his subsequent arrangement for her husband to be murdered, were dastardly crimes for which the severest punishment was due (2 Sam 12:10–13). But then, perhaps prompted by Nathan the prophet, David fasts and prays and lies down on the ground in self-abasement:
David said to Nathan: “I have sinned against the LORD.” Then Nathan said to David, “The LORD has set aside your punishment; you will not die. However, since you have spurned . . . the LORD in this matter, the son born to you [by Bathsheba] shall die” . . . And the LORD afflicted the baby whom [Bathsheba,] the wife of Uriah, had borne to him, so that it became weakened to death. David entreated God on the baby’s behalf, and he fasted and went in and lay down on the ground that night. When the senior servants of his palace arose and tried to get him up from the ground he refused, nor would he have any of the food they brought with them. Then, on the seventh day, the child died. (2 Sam 12:13–19)
Once again an innocent human being, the baby that Bathsheba had borne to David from their illicit union, is punished for someone else’s guilt. True, the baby was, quite literally, the product of their sin; nonetheless, this is another clear case of vicarious punishment, as if the newborn baby was no real person but something more like a finger or a toe of the king, to be chopped off as a painful but survivable loss in consideration of David’s ritual acts of appeal to God.
“Vicarious” and “transgenerational” punishment seem to be a regular feature in numerous passages in the Hebrew Bible.10 In perhaps the best known of such cases, God is said in the Ten Commandments to “visit the punishment of the parents upon the children, to the third and fourth generations of those who reject Me” (Exod 20:5)*11 The same principle is maintained in the list of divine attributes in Exodus 34:
The LORD passed in front of him [Moses] and cried out: the LORD, a God merciful and compassionate, patient and of great kindness and faithfulness; keeping kindness for the thousands, forgiving transgression and iniquity and sin. But He will not wipe away [all guilt], but will visit the transgression of the fathers upon their children and grandchildren, to the third and fourth generation. (Exod 34:6–7)12
This is Achan all over again: a person’s flesh and blood are ipso facto liable to be punished along with, or even instead of, the guilty person himself. Much later, the book of Lamentations still held by the same principle to explain the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians:
Our fathers sinned and are no more; but as for us, we are the ones to suffer their punishment. (Lam 5:7)
Nevertheless, this principle underwent evident modification in several places. The book of Deuteronomy, for example, quotes without modification the assertion in the Ten Commandments that God punishes children for their parents’ sins (Deut 5:9–10). But then it goes on to contradict that statement outright:
And you shall know that the LORD your God is the God, a God who may be trusted to uphold His covenant and loyalty to those who love Him and keep His commandments—for a thousand generations [to come]! But he requites directly anyone who rejects Him, destroying him; He accepts no delay for those who reject Him, but requites them directly. (Deut 7:9–10)
The Hebrew phrase translated as “directly” (el panayv) is sometimes rendered as “to their face,” “in their own person,” or “instantly.” Each of these carries a somewhat different nuance, but the overall sense seems clear: God will not have to resort to transgenerational punishment but will punish sinners directly, “in their own person,” without delay. Later in the same book, transgenerational punishment is once again c
learly ruled out:
Let fathers not be put to death because of [their] sons, nor sons be put to death because of their fathers; let each be put to death for his own offense. (Deut 24:16)13
Unripe Grapes
Along with these passages in Deuteronomy are equally striking ones in the book of Ezekiel. In fact these, even more clearly than those already seen, present transgenerational punishment as unacceptable:
What is wrong with you, O you who apply this proverb to the Land of Israel: “The fathers eat unripe grapes, but it is the children’s teeth that ache”? I swear, says the Lord GOD, you will no longer use this proverb against Israel. All lives belong to Me: as the life of the father, so is the life of the son—both are Mine. Whoever sins, that person will die. (Ezek 18:2–4)14
There follows a lengthy illustration of this principle: a righteous man who has led an exemplary life, “Such a man shall live, the Lord GOD says” (Ezek 18:9). But if such a man has a son who is quite his opposite—one who commits every sin in the book—“He [the son] shall not live! If he has committed any of these abominations, he shall be put to death; the responsibility is his” (Ezek 18:13). Now suppose the wicked son in turn has a son of his own, one who has “obeyed My statutes and observed My laws”:
He shall not die for the transgression[s] of his father—he shall surely live! His father, since he practiced oppression and robbed a brother and did no good [even] within his family—he died for his transgression[s]. And if you should ask, “But why isn’t the son punished for the sin of the father, however much the son himself may have acted justly and fairly, keeping all My laws and putting them into practice—shall such a one ‘surely live’?” [The answer:] The person who commits the sin is the one who shall die. The son will not bear the punishment of the father, nor will the father bear the punishment of the son. The righteous man’s righteousness will stand by him, and the wicked man’s wickedness will be upon him. (Ezek 18:18–20)
I have cited this repetitive set of examples precisely because it is so repetitive. Ezekiel sounds as if he’s talking to an eight-year-old. Now do you understand? Now do you get it? Clearly, even at this relatively late date, the idea of transgenerational or vicarious punishment was still deeply rooted. Ezekiel’s patient explanation is apparently aimed at an audience for whom the idea of individual responsibility needed detailed illustration.
This passage in Ezekiel is explicit in its abandoning transgenerational punishment. But it goes further: even undoubted sinners, if they turn from their evil ways, need not pay the penalty for their former misdeeds:
“But the wicked man, if he turns away15 from the sin that he has done and [now] keeps all My laws and acts justly and fairly, he [too] shall surely live and not die. All the sins that he did will not be counted against him; he shall live by dint of the righteous acts that he has done. Do I delight in the death of the wicked? asks the LORD. Rather, do I not [delight] in his turning away from his former doings, so that he may live?” (Ezek 18:21–23)16
The Transgenerational Advantage
In view of this apparent evolution—from (1) punishing children for the sins of their fathers to (2) assigning responsibility for sins only to those who actually committed them, to (3) divine forgiveness even for the sinner himself, so long as he abandons his sinful ways—one might well ask why these changes took so long to work themselves out. Indeed, why should God ever have been represented as punishing later generations for the sins of earlier ones? But actually, it made good sense. Everyday life, as human beings have always observed, often seems unfair. Apparently virtuous people sometimes end up suffering terrible mishaps, while the notoriously sinful at times seem to be getting away scot-free. Even the most obvious candidates for reward or punishment are sometimes passed over. Gangsters and politicians ride around in chauffeur-driven limousines, while professors take the bus. Where is divine justice?
Vicarious punishment offered a kind of answer. The guilty may seem to get away with their crimes, but God is simply biding His time, perhaps even unto the third or fourth generation. As for the reward of the virtuous, this too may take time, but even if the virtuous person himself died unrewarded, somewhere down the line, one of his descendants will be receiving a reward all out of keeping with his own modest virtue: he’s living off the good deeds of his departed ancestor. Moreover, if the divine bureaucracy thus appears sluggish or inscrutable, well, so does the human one. In either case, things seem eventually to work out, and that is the main thing; justice delayed may nonetheless be just.
This should in turn cause us to view the above-cited passages from Deuteronomy and Ezekiel in a somewhat different light. In rejecting the old, familiar argument of vicarious punishment, these passages were, in effect, throwing away God’s best excuse. What could make these biblical authors take such a step? It is tempting, in the context of the present study, to say that somehow an ancient sense of self—one whose “I” included a person’s whole family, indeed, whole tribe or people—had been slowly eroding. The truth now seemed far simpler: the only fair way to administer reward and punishment was directly, el panayv; the unripe grapes should affect only the teeth of him or her who ate them. As the French sociologist Marcel Mauss observed, “There has never existed a human being who has not been aware, not only of his own body, but also at the same time of his individuality, both spiritual and physical.”17 But what the human makes of this awareness—a person’s sense of self—is always a construct.
At the same time, it is far from clear that anything as basic as a change in people’s sense of self was involved in the matter of divine punishment. The shift from vicarious to direct punishment may have started off as some particular person’s idea, an idea about justice that gradually gained widespread acceptance (at least in the Hebrew Bible); but such a change need not necessarily have been rooted in something quite so deep or widespread as a change in people’s sense of self, a new way of conceiving of themselves as individuals. The fading out of transgenerational punishment may be symptomatic of something broader, but this remains to be seen.
In the meantime, it is also worth mentioning (though this hardly undermines the previous argument) that the rejection of vicarious punishment, like so many things in biblical thought, proceeded by two steps forward, one step back. Long after any of the above-cited texts was written came the book of Esther, whose stereotypical villain, Haman, received classical transgenerational punishment: not only was he killed, but his ten sons were executed after him (Esther 9:7–10)—what did they do, apart from having the wrong father? In fact, five hundred other people (Esther 9:6) were subsequently killed, then three hundred more (9:15), and finally an additional seventy-five thousand for good measure (9:16). True, these corpses may be the fantasy of a subject people eager to imagine that revenge had, at least on one occasion, been theirs; but whatever else these numbers prove, they seem to be saying that the idea of vicarious punishment was not altogether dead.
Thinking About Myself
The next item to be discussed is a bit harder to pin down than the straightforward acceptance or rejection of vicarious punishment; still it needs to be mentioned. A number of relatively late biblical texts present a person’s thoughts about himself, reflecting on his life in general or recounting something that has happened to him—in short, something that might fit under the general heading of “thinking about myself.” Clearly, this would seem to belong in a chapter about the elusive individual, precisely because such self-reflections are strikingly absent from the Hebrew Bible. But what exactly counts as self-reflection?18
It is sometimes said that King David is the most interesting “character” in the Bible (perhaps because his story is no literary invention at all, but a slightly airbrushed record of the real-life doings of a guerilla leader who robbed and murdered his way to the throne).19 But it may be significant for our subject that there is not a lot of self-reflection in this story. David is defined by his actions; we are not privy to his inner thoughts in his relations with Saul or
Jonathan or Bathsheba or anyone else, nor are we told what he was planning at various crucial turning points in his life—in short, there is very little “I” there, and apparently not because he was a particularly self-effacing personality. The same might be said of earlier heroes, such as Samson in the book of Judges. He performs all manner of amazing feats of strength in Judges 14–15, then carries on with Delilah for much of the next chapter—but what he was thinking about what was happening to him, at the time or even afterwards (when the Philistines gouge out his eyes before bringing him down to Gaza), is a total blank.
As mentioned, such things may be significant, but not necessarily. The absence of self-reflection from biblical biographies may simply be a matter of literary convention that tells us nothing about the biblical sense of self in Samson’s time, or David’s. To mention an analogous case: for centuries, Western historiography consisted mainly of recounting military conquests and defeats, as well as recording (and often distorting) the doings of kings and queens in court, sometimes degenerating into the grossest sort of royal boasting. (After all, who was paying the historians?) Social history—chronicling the way ordinary people lived and died—is essentially an invention of the twentieth century; a spinoff, women’s history, emerged only toward the end of that century. Or, returning to the world of the Hebrew Bible, scant attention is paid to women there, even insofar as they affect men; there is thus almost no mention of affairs of the heart in the Bible, no face that launches a thousand ships. But this probably tells us nothing about the real-life role of women in biblical times—only about what was deemed significant, or seemly, to report. Another example of the influence of literary convention on our question may lie in those psalms of request examined earlier, in which the psalmist pulls out all the stops, relating in gruesome detail his physical suffering or the threats to his life. This too seems to be a matter of convention, reflecting an unspoken assumption concerning God’s response to prayer: “If you want My help, you’d better need it!” (And of course none of this is accompanied by any account of the psalmist’s inner life, of what he is thinking in these dire straits, apart from the fact that he is in mortal danger and needs help now.)
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