“Then David said to Nathan, ‘I have sinned against the Lord.’  Nathan replied, “The Lord has taken away your sin. You are not going to die.  But because by doing this you have shown utter contempt for the Lord, the son born to you will die’”  (2 Samuel 12:13-14 [New International Version]).
“Parents are not to be put to death for their children, nor children put to death for their parents; each will die for their own sin” (Deuteronomy 24:16 [New International Version])
In my last column, I offered an interpretation of Numbers 5 in which I acknowledged, in concert with the majority of interpreters, that the text involves the creation of an abortifacient that would cause the child of an unfaithful sexual encounter to be aborted.
Because that interpretation was highly focused, I chose to ignore the wider theological problem that Numbers 5 raises, which is highlighted by the two texts above.
On the one hand, Deuteronomy 24 appears to establish the principle that individuals die for their own sins.  It is preceded by a legal instruction that employers are not to take advantage of employees by withholding their wages (vv. 14-15) and is followed by a legal instruction not to withhold justice from the foreigner, the orphan, or the widow (vv. 17-18 and 19-22).  It is absolute in tone and wording, and does not appear to allow for any exceptions.
On the other hand, 2 Samuel 11-12 narrate David’s sexual assault on Bathsheba, the murder of Uriah to cover up Bathsheba’s pregnancy, and Nathan’s prosecution of David’s sin on God’s behalf.  Once Nathan points out David’s sin, David admits his sin, God forgives David’s sin, and the child born to David and Bathsheba is struck by God and dies (“the Lord struck the child… and he became ill…  On the seventh day the child died” [2 Sam 12:15a, 18]).
Did you catch that?  The child is killed as a consequence of David’s sin.
Just as the unborn child is aborted as a consequence of the wife’s unfaithfulness in Numbers 5.
Just as the proverb affirms, “The parents have eat sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge” (quoted in Jeremiah 31:29; see also Ezekiel 18:2).
Just as the Old Testament confesses that God “punishes the children and their children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation” (Exodus 34:7).
What did the child(ren) do to deserve to be killed?
It is worth noting that both Jeremiah and Ezekiel reject this proverbial wisdom.
Jeremiah does so by having God quote the proverb which is immediately rejected:  “Instead, everyone will die for their own sin; whoever eats sour grapes—their own teeth will be set on edge” (Jeremiah 31:30).
Ezekiel does so by a longer treatment, which starts again with the rejection of the proverbial wisdom:   “The one who sins is the one who will die” (Ezekiel 18:4).  Ezekiel then considers the case of the righteous father and his unrighteous son (vv. 5-13), followed by the case of this unrighteous son and his own righteous son (vv. 14-18).
The text concludes with a lengthy section on individual accountability which includes this text:  “Yet you ask, ‘Why does the [righteous] son not share the guilt of his [unrighteous] father?’ Since the son has done what is just and right and has been careful to keep all my decrees, he will surely live.  The one who sins is the one who will die. The child will not share the guilt of the parent, nor will the parent share the guilt of the child” (vv. 19-20).
If the death of the child as the consequence for the parents’ sin in 2 Samuel 12 isn’t the most difficult problem for a moral theology of the Old Testament, it must be in the top five.  The fact that there are different voices within the Old Testament – Numbers 5, 2 Samuel 12, and Exodus 34 on the one hand, Deuteronomy 24, Jeremiah 31, and Ezekiel 18 on the other – simply underscores just how difficult the theological problem is.
To be sure, the New RSV softens the conflict by translating “sin” in Deuteronomy 24:16 with “crimes,” based in part on 2 Kings 14:6 which seems to quote this particular law.  This would certainly affect the relationship between Deuteronomy 24 (on the one hand) and Jeremiah 31 / Ezekiel 18 (on the other).  But it wouldn’t address the conflict with 2 Samuel 11-12 because the rape is both a crime and a sin.  (Unless we want to argue that because David is the King, it would not be a crime.  I’m not willing to walk that path.)
And thus I have a personal confession to make.  I don’t know how to resolve this conflict.
On the one hand, I can understand how children are made to suffer for their parents’ sin through no fault of their own.  Children whose parents are drug addicts are born as drug addicts through no fault of their own.  Children who live with abusive parents are abused (verbally, physically, sexually, emotionally) through no fault of their own.  If parents can’t afford to buy groceries, then children go hungry through no fault of their own.
In that sense, an affirmation that consequences affect not only the parent but also the child is perfectly reasonable, even though God has been removed from that equation entirely.  Indeed, I’ve often used the metaphor of drug-addicted infants as a way of interpreting the hereditary passing-on of original sin.
But that is very different from a child being killed because of his father’s crime of sexual assault or his mother’s infidelity.
Some scholars fall back upon the idea that God as God is free to do whatever God wants, grounding this view in the image of the potter and the clay (Jeremiah 18) or the dictum that God’s ways are higher than our ways (Isaiah 55) or God’s pulling rank on Job when Job questioned whether he deserved to suffer (Job 38-42).
That’s probably the best that we can do, short of declaring God’s behavior with respect to the child in 2 Samuel 12 as immoral and indefensibly unjust.  Attempts to replace the straightforward reading of these texts with something less objectionable will amount to nothing more than special pleading that avoids the hard question.
In the end, people who wish to live a vibrant faith in the 21st century will acknowledge difficult texts like these without glossing over them.  Instead, we will acknowledge the existence of troubling texts, we will read these texts for what they say, even and especially when they are morally or theologically problematic, and we will hold our interpretations of these problematic texts with humility.

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