Charles Ellicott Commentary Jeremiah 31:29-30

"In those days they shall say no more, The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children`s teeth are set on edge. But every one shall die for his own iniquity: every man that eateth the sour grapes, his teeth shall be set on edge." — Jeremiah 31:29-30 (ASV)

The fathers have eaten a sour grape ... —The proverb was one which, as we find from Ezekiel 18:2-3, had at that 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 had come when, even at the risk of a seeming contradiction to words clothed with Divine authority, the other aspect of God’s government had to be asserted in all its fullness. Therefore, they laid 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 saying, “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,” “You, for no guilt of yours, will pay the forfeit of your fathers’ sins” (Horace, Odes, iii. 6, 1), show how ready men have been at all times to make a similar 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.