Text: Ezekiel 5:10
OT Text Referred to: Deuteronomy 24:16
Subject: covenant curse violating intergenerational justice
Source: Keil and Delitzsch, Commentary on the Old Testament (1866)
Reference Type: Allusion
Connection Method(s): Contrast
Significance: Ezekiel 5:10 depicts fathers eating sons and sons eating fathers during Jerusalem's siege, a horror that directly inverts the principle of Deuteronomy 24:16, which forbids punishing children for fathers' sins or vice versa. The Deuteronomic law protects intergenerational boundaries in judicial proceedings, but Ezekiel portrays a covenant breakdown so total that these boundaries collapse into literal mutual consumption. The contrast underscores how thoroughly Jerusalem's sin has dismantled the Torah's social order, reducing the covenantal community to a state worse than the nations around them.