“Honor your father and your mother, so that you may live long in the land the Lord your God is giving you” (Exodus 20:12 NIV).

In our individualistic society, we tend to interpret the fifth of the Ten Commandments in an individual way. We think it means that if I personally honor my parents, then God will reward me with a long life. But this commandment was part of the covenant between God and the whole people of God, the Israelites. Although we should obey it individually, it is primarily a communal commandment. It was a foundational command for a whole society. The idea was that if the people generally honored their parents, then the whole society would benefit. Even on a strictly human plane, a society where parents are honored and parents care for their children will be a stable society. Where families are strong, societies are strong. When families collapse (as happens too often in our society), individuals are rootless and directionless, falling into despair, addiction, crime, and poverty.

But even more than that, in Israelite society, the intention was that faith in God and knowledge of God were to be passed down from one generation to the next: “These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up” (Deuteronomy 6:6-7). If children honored their parents by accepting this teaching and then passing it on to their children, then the Israelites would worship and obey God generation after generation. If that happened, then the whole nation would be blessed by God and would be allowed to remain in the land that God was giving them, the Promised Land.

Further, the commandment was not even individual to a single generation. The command to honor father and mother did not just apply to immediate parents but to ancestors from previous generations. Honoring their parents would mean that the Israelites would cherish the legacy of faith that had been passed down from Abraham to Isaac to Jacob to Jacob’s twelve sons (who had founded the twelve tribes of Israel). It would mean being faithful to the covenant presented to them through Moses and reinforced by later prophets. If the Israelites had followed this commandment, their nation would have prospered, God would have blessed them, and they would have remained in the Promised Land instead of being punished with invasion and exile.