Deuteronomy 24:16 expressly forbids putting children to death for their parents' sins, and Ezekiel 18:20 restates that 'the son shall not bear the iniquity of the father,' yet God commands and enacts collective punishment killing children alongside guilty parties (2 Sam 12:15-18, the death of David and Bathsheba's infant; Ex 12:29-30, the Egyptian firstborn; 1 Sam 15:3, the command against Amalekite children; Num 31:17-18; Isa 13:16-18; Gen 7:21-23, the Flood), and Exodus 20:5 has God 'visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation.'

The objection conflates two distinct categories. (1) Deut 24:16 legislates judicial policy binding human courts and judges in Israel, forbidding vicarious criminal liability in ordinary jurisprudence -- a genuine moral advance relative to surrounding ANE law, which explicitly permitted vicarious punishment (e.g., Code of Hammurabi §230, executing a builder's son for a house collapse that killed a homeowner's son). (2) The narrated episodes are not human courts applying Deut 24:16; they are divine judgments within a covenantal, corporate framework, addressed by the concept of corporate personality/solidarity (classically articulated by H. Wheeler Robinson): in the Israelite and broader ANE worldview, family, tribe and nation shared a corporate fate, a category distinct from individual forensic guilt before a human court. Ezekiel 18 is not denying corporate solidarity as such (Ezekiel elsewhere assumes corporate national judgment throughout chapters 4-24); it is rebutting a specific fatalistic proverb ('parents eat sour grapes, children's teeth are set on edge,' Ezek 18:2) used to deny personal moral agency before God -- a different target than the narrative episodes. Exodus 20:5's 'visiting iniquity... upon the children' is qualified in the very next clause by 'of those who hate me,' indicating perpetuated rebellion rather than indiscriminate guilt-transfer, and is set against a deliberately disproportionate mercy clause -- 'steadfast love to the thousandth generation' -- signaling that judgment is bounded while mercy is unbounded. Some cited episodes (e.g., plague deaths) are consequences of corporate covenant curse on a guilty nation rather than direct execution of a child for one parent's individual crime in the Deut 24:16 sense. This is honestly one of the harder tensions in the Old Testament, and the corporate-solidarity distinction resolves the category confusion without fully dissolving the moral weight of specific hard narratives (David's infant, conquest-era children), which deserve their own extended treatment elsewhere.

Scripture's own trajectory moves toward increasingly explicit individual responsibility (Ezekiel, later Rom 14:12, Rev 20:12) while retaining a coherent theology of covenant solidarity (the Church as one Body; federal headship in Adam and Christ, Rom 5) -- a considered biblical anthropology of persons-in-community, not a bug, differing from modern individualism but coherent on its own terms.