What Does Jeremiah 31:29 Mean?

(29, 30) **The fathers have eaten a sour grape . . .**—The proverb was one which, as we find from Ezekiel 18:2-3, had at this time come into common use. Men found in it an explanation of their sufferings which relieved their consciences. They were suffering, they said, for the sins of their fathers, not for their own. They distorted the words which, as asserting the continuity of national life, were attached to the second Commandment (Exodus 20:5), and instead of finding in them a warning restraining them from evil by the fear of transmitting evil to another generation, they found in them a plea for their own recklessness. Both Ezekiel and Jeremiah felt that the time was come when, even at the risk of a seeming contradiction to words clothed with a Divine authority, the other aspect of God’s government had to be asserted in all its fulness: and therefore they lay stress on the truth that each man is responsible for his own acts, and for those alone, and that the law of the inheritance of evil (what we have learnt to call the law of *hérédité*) leaves untouched the freedom of man’s will. The “eater of the sour grape, his teeth shall be set on edge,” is, as it were, an emendation of the proverbial saying. The words of the Latin poet, “Delicta majorum immeritus lues,” “Thou, for *no *guilt of thine, shalt pay the forfeit of thy fathers’ sins” (Hor. *Od. *iii. 6, 1), show how ready men have been at all times to make a like excuse. How the two truths are to be reconciled, the law of hereditary tendencies, and punishments that fall not on the original offenders, but on their children, and the law of individual responsibility, is a question to which we can give no formal answer. We must be content to accept both laws, and rest in the belief that the Judge of all the earth will assuredly do right.