Charles Ellicott Commentary Exodus 20:12

"Honor thy father and thy mother, that thy days may be long in the land which Jehovah thy God giveth thee." — Exodus 20:12 (ASV)

Honour thy father and thy mother. —It is not a matter of great importance how we divide the commandments, nor is it historically certain how they were originally distributed between the two tables. However, practically, the view that the fifth commandment begins the second table, which defines our duty towards our neighbours, is preferable for its convenience, even though it encroaches upon symmetrical arrangement.

Of all our duties to our fellow human beings, the first and most fundamental is our duty towards our parents. This duty lies at the root of all our social relations and is the first of which we naturally become conscious. Honour, reverence, and obedience are due to parents because of the position in which they stand to their children:

1. As, in a certain sense, the authors of their being;
2. As their shelterers and nourishers;
3. As their protectors and educators, from whom they derive the foundation of their moral training and the first elements of their knowledge.

Even among peoples in simpler societies, the obligations of children towards their parents are felt and acknowledged to a greater or lesser extent; and there has never been a civilized community whose moral code has not included them as an important part. In Egypt, the duty of filial piety was strictly inculcated from a very early date (Lenormant, Histoire Ancienne, vol. i., pp. 342, 343), and a bad son forfeited the prospect of happiness in another life (ibid., pp. 513, 514). Confucianism bases all morality on the parental and filial relation, and requires the most complete subjection, even of the grown-up son, to his father and mother.

Greek ethics taught that the relation of children to their parents was parallel to that of humans to God (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 8:12, § 5); and Rome made the absolute authority of the father the basis of its entire state system. The Divine legislation of Sinai is in full accord, here as elsewhere, with the voice of reason and conscience, affirming broadly the principles of parental authority and filial submission, but leaving the manner in which the principles should be carried out to the discretion of individuals or communities.

That thy days may be long upon the land. —The fifth commandment (as all allow) is “the first commandment with promise” (Ephesians 6:2); but the promise may be understood in two quite different senses.

1. It may be taken as guaranteeing national permanence to the people among whom filial respect and obedience is generally practised; or
2. It may be understood in the simpler and more literal sense of a pledge that obedient children shall, as a general rule, receive for their reward the blessing of long life.

In favour of the former view, the facts of Roman and Chinese permanence have been urged, together with the probability that Israel forfeited its possession of Canaan as a consequence of persisting in the breach of this commandment.

In favour of the latter view, the application of the text by St. Paul (Ephesians 6:3), which is purely personal and not ethnic, may be adduced; and the exegesis of the Son of Sirach , which is similar. It is also worthy of note that an Egyptian sage, who wrote long before Moses, declared it as the result of his experience that obedient sons did attain to a good old age in Egypt, and broadly laid down the principle that “the son who attends to the words of his father will grow old in consequence” (Lenormant, Histoire Ancienne, vol. i., p. 342).