Exodus 20:12

“Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.”

--  KJV

Are the modern translators lying? Not completely.

Is it confusing? Without question.

Is the confusion convenient for authority figures? Absolutely.

"You didn't honor your commitment."

What does that mean to you?

"He received a dishonorable discharge."

What does that mean to you?

To me, and to most people raised in modern society, "honor" implies submission to rules, orders, and rank. It is very easy to deduce from "Honor thy father and mother" that we are commanded to unquestioningly obey, respect, and defer to our parents, regardless of who or what they are.

This is one of the Ten Commandments. You would think that institutions claiming a mission to save souls would demand absolute clarity here. This is where modern religion often causes faith to buckle. It might just be me—I could be your run-of-the-mill cynic—but hear me out. If your faith has ever felt troubled by this command, this might be why. 

Version Study & Takeaway

The Linguistic Trap:

In Biblical Hebrew, the verb is Kabbēd. It comes from the root meaning heavy, dense, or weighty. It translates to a principle, not a blank check of moral approval.

Rendering it simply as "honor" has allowed generations of religious teachers to flatten the command into blind obedience. Translators throughout history faced extraordinary pressures. Going against ecclesiastical orthodoxy meant excommunication, prison, or worse. Martin Luther had a price on his head, and Queen Mary earned her bloody moniker by burning Protestants at the stake for daring to challenge church doctrine. Nuance has always been dangerous to the people running the institutions.

Luther and the reformers didn't risk the pyre over mere vocabulary; they died over who gets access. The institutional hierarchy wanted salvation behind a tollbooth—a commodity controlled by priests, paid for in coins, penance, and unquestioning obedience. Luther’s radical claim was that grace was free, direct, and meant for the everyday person.

When an institution demands that kind of monopoly, it has every incentive to flatten the text into an instrument of control. A commandment about grappling with the undeniable weight of your origins gets reduced to a simple mandate: obey the authorities, keep your head down, and don't ask questions.

But that missing nuance matters.

My biological father was not a man worthy of respect. My stepfather was a monster. My mother was an alcoholic who thought it was hilarious when she set off the proximity alarms at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam because she was plastered.

I could not honor them. And because of that, I carried crushing guilt for 50 years. All I really understood about Christianity was the Ten Commandments, and as far as I could tell, I was already condemned under the fifth one. If I had known back then that my life had not already been written off as unsalvageable, maybe I would have made different choices along the way. Maybe not. I will never know.

In its authentic Hebrew context, Kabbēd means:

"Treat as weighty."

"Ascribe substance and significance to."

"Do not treat as light, hollow, or trivial."

The Takeaway: 

Take the reality of your parents seriously. Recognize the massive, undeniable gravity they hold over your life. The deeds and dysfunctions of parents are handed down like an inheritance, trapping children in generational patterns that can ruin their future.

The "arable land" is where the seed takes root to feed the community. If you poison the soil with unexamined trauma, the crop dies and the inheritance is lost.

Giving weight to your parents doesn't mean pretending their abuse was holy, or that their drunkenness was respectable. It means looking directly at what they were, understanding the weight of what they passed down, and refusing to treat it as trivial. Learn from them—both what to emulate and what to cut out with a scalpel.

When read as it was actually written, the commandment isn't an order to bow to monsters. It is a survival warning: reckon with the weight of where you came from, so you don't destroy the ground you stand on. 

I am not going to hell because I became an addict, I became an addict because they convinced me I was going to hell before I was 13.