Leviticus 20:9, commentary and pictures

Anyone who curses father or mother shall surely be put to death, for such cursing or dishonoring of a parent is a grave violation of the duty owed to father and mother. Unlike the law for the man-slayer, no escape from punishment is provided for this offense against parents, though the accused could still expect a fair trial. To curse father or mother is to break the fifth commandment.

The requirement belongs to the civil laws and civil code of the Hebrew nation under its theocracy, with death inflicted at the hand of the civil magistrate. The death penalty was no part of the commandment itself but a later separate enactment for that people in that place and time, so holding the seventh-day Sabbath or the other commandments binding now does not require stoning Sabbath-breakers or putting the breakers of the other commandments to death. The same death penalty was affixed to most of the precepts of the moral law, including the Sabbath, showing that the moral law embracing the Sabbath formed part of that civil code. Its inclusion shows the fifth commandment, like the rest of the Decalogue, was binding on Gentiles before the law was spoken at Sinai, and the nations of Canaan and Egypt were held accountable for dishonoring or cursing father and mother.

Penalties inflicted by the magistrate pointed forward to the final retribution of the ungodly. Their enforcement was suspended by the decision that only those without sin should cast the first stone, but the precept that was violated was not weakened nor the real penalty of the law, the wages of sin, set aside, and a sinless Being will yet arise to punish men when the hailstones of His wrath desolate the earth. The verse illustrates the curse brought by willful transgression of God's law: the offender falls under its curse unto death, with responsibility for his blood resting upon himself.

Together with its context in Leviticus 18 and 20 on the evils practiced by the nations that dwelt in Canaan and their consequences, the verse serves as a warning about the evil effects and possibilities associated with Spiritualism. It illustrates punishment in Gehenna, the valley of Hinnom south of Jerusalem, once celebrated for the worship and image of Moloch where its worshipers were destroyed and afterward polluted with filth, carcasses of animals, and dead bodies of criminals consumed by constant fires kept burning to avert pestilence. That burning punishment, as in the law that a priest's daughter who profaned herself was to be burned with fire, proves Gehenna was a place of punishment by burning, and punishment will again take place there. Though cited in connection with prohibitions involving incest and marriages that violated rules of kinship, the chapter does not teach that a child born outside marriage cannot be saved.