I.e. alcoholism / domestic violence often can follow down generations due to children experiencing this when they are growing up and never learning another way and acting this way when they become an adult. This sin must have started at one generation of a family.

I\’m not saying this is part of God\’s direct vengeance / work (I don\’t presume to know anything about how God choses to work) but we do see this pattern every day. It\’s a bit much obviously to say that children should suffer punishment because of their parent\’s sin but unfortunately it just often seems to happen this way. It takes a very strong person not to fall into the same old patterns they were taught as a child, and it requires a knowledge that the ways they were taught were wrong, so it\’s no wonder that often certain destructive behaviours can follow down generations of a family.

It\’s a toughie :S

Just imagine, standing there at Mount Sinai, having survived the challenges and hardship of the Exodus until now, and then receiving this resentfulness being (possibly- you never know!) condemned for the wrongs others did. This is very unsettling on an emotional individual level, agitating on a social level and threatening on a spiritual level. As an individual I am willing to take over full responsibility for my own goods and wrongs, as a social person in a social relational context (small or big) but I am not accepting to be punished (physical, psychological, spiritual) for what generations before me did. Although I am certainly more than aware of the responsibility I have – being the person I am with all the implications in a genealogical sense.

This unforgiving resentfulness, coming from a weak place – as I see jealousy as a sign of emotional weakness – is the aspect of the Godhead of the OT I find highly disturbing for myself and politically extremely dangerous for a healthy society.

There is definitively lots of potential for emotional maturation.