God is unjust, repeatedly punishing the innocent.

It should be conceded honestly that a real internal tension exists between texts affirming corporate/familial solidarity in guilt and consequence, and texts (Ezekiel 18; Jer 31:29-30, explicitly correcting a popular proverb about corporate guilt: 'the fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge') that insist on strictly individual responsibility. That the canon itself names and wrestles with this tension is significant: it shows self-aware moral reflection developing across the text, not naive, unexamined endorsement of collective punishment. Several distinctions bear on the specific cases. First, ANE household law treated the family as a real corporate legal unit in ways foreign to modern individualism; the narrative detail that Achan's family helped hide the stolen goods in the tent (Josh 7:21-24) suggests complicity rather than pure innocence-by-association, within that ancient household-liability framework. Second, on the census plague, the text does not present God executing 70,000 individually innocent people by unilateral fiat so much as a plague (a natural mechanism, consistent with epidemic outbreak accompanying troop mobilization in the ancient world) following divine judgment on the nation's king for a specific act of hubris (the census itself likely signaled reliance on military strength rather than on God) — and it is worth noting honestly that 2 Samuel 24 and its parallel in 1 Chronicles 21 differ on some numerical details, a recognized textual-transmission variant. Third, the Egyptian plagues and the Flood operate within an explicit theology of sustained national/generational culpability and patience: Egypt receives nine prior plagues and opportunities to relent under a persistently covenant-breaking Pharaoh, and Genesis 6:3 and the rabbinic tradition (echoed in 1 Peter 3:20, 'the patience of God waited in the days of Noah') depict a long period of forbearance before judgment, not capriciousness. A further philosophical point (Edward Feser's treatment of the harder Canaanite-conquest question applies analogously here): the objection implicitly assumes humans possess an autonomous right to a longer life that God is obligated to grant, extending the question from 'does God wrong the dead' to merely 'who determines the timing of a mortality every human already owes.' This does not resolve every hard case, but it reframes the metaphysical stakes correctly.

The Old Testament's own trajectory — Ezekiel and Jeremiah's explicit turn toward individual responsibility — is not reversed but radicalized in the New Testament (Rom 14:12, 'each of us will give an account of himself to God'), while retaining a real, carefully qualified solidarity (federal headship in Adam, and in Christ, Rom 5:12-19) that finds its full and only truly innocent-for-guilty resolution in substitutionary atonement: the one wholly innocent party bearing what the guilty deserved, the sole case in the whole narrative where 'punishing the innocent' is not a problem but the deliberate center of the gospel (2 Cor 5:21).