John Calvin Commentary Deuteronomy 1:39

"Moreover your little ones, that ye said should be a prey, and your children, that this day have no knowledge of good or evil, they shall go in thither, and unto them will I give it, and they shall possess it." — Deuteronomy 1:39 (ASV)

Moreover, your little ones. I have already shown that God so tempered His judgment that, while none of the guilty should escape with impunity, still His faithfulness should remain sure and inviolable, and that the wickedness of men should not invalidate the covenant which He had made with Abraham. He, therefore, pronounces sentence upon them, that they should never enjoy the inheritance which they had despised; yet declares that He will nevertheless be true in the fulfillment of what He had promised, and will display His mercy towards their children, whom in their despair they had condemned to be a prey to their enemies.

When He limits this grace to their little ones, whose age did not yet allow them to discern between good and evil, He signifies that all who had already reached the age of reason were, from the least to the greatest, accomplices in the crime, since the contagion had spread through the whole body. Surely it was an astonishing event that so great a multitude should be so carried away by diabolical fury that nothing remained unaffected by it, unless perhaps a timely death removed some of the old men more on account of the vice of others than their own. But, if even a hundredth part of them had been guiltless of the crime, God would have left some survivors.

“To have no knowledge of good and evil,” is equivalent to being unable to discern between their right hand and their left hand; by which expression in Jonah (Jonah 4:11), God exempts from condemnation those little ones who do not yet have the power to form a judgment. Hence, however, some have foolishly attempted to prove that infants are not defiled by original sin, and that men are involved in no guilt except such as they have individually contracted by their own voluntary act (arbitrio.) For the question here is not about the nature of the human race; a distinction is simply made between children and those who have consciously and willfully provoked God’s wrath; whereas the corruption, which is the root (of all evils, ⁷⁶) although it may not immediately produce its fruit in actual sins, is not ⁷⁷ therefore non-existent.

⁷⁶ Added from Fr.

⁷⁷ “Ne laisse pas d’estre cachee en nous;” Does not cease to lie hid within us. — Fr..