What the Bible Says About Reparations for Slavery

The case for paying reparations to descendants of slaves has been gaining momentum nationwide. In 2019, Evanston, Ill., became the first municipality to adopt such a program. California’s Legislature appears poised to do likewise. The District of Columbia Council is considering a program that would be funded in part by various local taxes. According to Census Bureau statistics, 45% of the city’s population is African-American, which would mean that the recipients of reparations would be footing a large proportion of the bill.

It is thus both timely and appropriate to ask: Are such proposals just?

Any examination of the question must begin with the notion of time and its relation to evil acts. The Bible, in Exodus 34:7 and elsewhere, tells us that God will “visit the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation.”

These passages acknowledge that bad acts frequently have consequences that ripple beyond the temporal space of the perpetrator and can create a sphere of responsibility that far exceeds the individual actor. Importantly, the text also indicates that the ripples dissipate after three or four generations. The adverse consequences of nefarious acts don’t continue indefinitely—and, similarly, the desire for vengeance and the right to compensation for such acts can’t endure forever.

Why only three or four generations? This limitation is tied to the duration of emotional memory, including the transmitted personal sense of suffering and injustice. Most people have a vivid awareness of and emotional ties to parents and grandparents—perhaps even to a great-grandparent. Yet no such bonds can plausibly exist beyond that. The Bible is thus establishing a statute of limitations that is tied to the strength of personal memory and, therefore, to a limitation on the personalized rectification of historic wrongs.

Our legal system echoes this biblical teaching. Civil and criminal statutes of limitation generally bring to an end the pursuit of perpetrators for acts that are too distant in time to warrant subjection to judicial processes. Implicitly they also recognize that witnesses, tangible evidence, and raw emotions engendered by wrongful acts have disappeared—no matter how heinous the offenses.

While American slavery remains a powerful and tragic historical event, there are no individuals alive today who have direct personal links to it or even to those who suffered directly as a consequence of it. For all its evil and injustice, slavery is no longer a personal reality in the U.S. It is still a wrong to be righted, but in a collective manner, through national efforts—civil-rights legislation, improvements in education, public services, quality-of-life enhancements for the descendants of slaves, and the like. To its credit, our nation has vigorously pursued such efforts for decades.

The notion that direct compensation should be paid to sixth-, seventh- or eighth-generation descendants of slavery’s victims by similarly distant descendants of those who may have been complicit with slavery is simply unjust. The original actors, perpetrators and victims, are too far removed in time to merit punishment or retribution.

It is appropriate to punish a perpetrator or exact restitution from an individual who may have benefited directly from the acts of the perpetrator. Yet more than 1½ centuries’ distance makes such punishment for slavery incompatible with justice. Similarly, individuals separated by many generations from a vile act suffered by distant ancestors can’t have a justiciable claim for suffering they didn’t endure directly or indirectly.

The challenge with respect to events having occurred more than three or four generations ago is how to convert them into lessons for the future. Shorn of their direct and personal emotional effect, such memories can readily be forgotten, misremembered or distorted. It is necessary to retain accurate conceptions of injustice and equally important to make constructive use of them.

Jewish tradition offers a way to do so. Every spring Jews celebrate Passover, the holiday that commemorates the Jewish people’s liberation from slavery in Egypt. Passover emphasizes not vengeance or retribution but important teachings: gratitude to God for freeing the Jews and for the blessings of freedom, together with the divinely inspired injunction never to treat others as the Jews were treated. In our commemoration, we also remember the death and destruction of the Egyptians—not as an act of triumphalism but rather out of compassion for the suffering of fellow human beings.

This tradition is a template for addressing the consequences of slavery in America. The best and most equitable reparations lie not in cash payments but in remembering and teaching the lessons of slavery—of its terrible consequences and of the suffering of those who endured it. Such an approach is fundamentally just, constructive and unlimited by time.

Mr. Leval is a Washington lawyer and author of “Lobbying for Equality: Jacques Godard and the Struggle for Jewish Civil Rights during the French Revolution.”