HEBREW WORD STUDY: HONOR KAVOD – כבד Kap Beth Daleth

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.”

​I was listening to a popular talk show host named Dennis Prager who is Jewish and a Hebrew and Torah scholar. He has written a commentary on the Books of Genesis and Exodus which I strongly recommend. He is presently working on a commentary on the Book of Numbers which I am sure will be just as informative and easy to read as his other two commentaries.

In the commentary on Exodus, he discusses an issue I read about in the Talmud where the ten commandments were written on two tablets, the first five represented commandments dealing with human to God relationship and the remaining five on the other tablet represented human to human relationships. Yet the fifth commandment seems to speak of human to human, that we are to honor our fathers and mothers. Dennis Prager explains, as the Talmud does, that both God and our parents are creators. Thus, honoring our parents serve as a bridge from our obligations to God to our obligations to other humans.

But then he points out something that I never realized. God tells us to honor our parents. No where does it say we are to love our parents. We are commanded to love God (Genesis 6:4), our neighbors (Leviticus 19:18), to love strangers (Leviticus 19:34), to love our enemies (Luke 6:27) and even to love ourselves (Leviticus 19:18). So why are we not commanded to love our parents?

Prager gives his reasons which are good and probably better than mine but since he gave his reason in his commentary and I am encouraging you to purchase his commentary I will just give you my reasons. It is similar to Prager’s.

First, I do not believe we are commanded to love God. I believe that the Vav that introduces the words “And thou shalt love” is not a Vav conversive. The word love is in a Qal perfect form. If the preceding Vav had a pathah underneath it, it would be conversive that is it would convert the perfect into an imperfect. As I do not see this Vav as a conversive the word love remains in a perfect form or a completed action form. Thus, it is rendered: “You do love the Lord your God.” In Deuteronomy 30:6 we learn that God will circumcise our hearts so that we will love Him. The word circumcise as described in an earlier study is the word mul which also means to scrape. God will scrape our hearts, He will scrape that harden shell from our hearts to release the love He has put in there. But He has given us a free will and we can choose to harden our hearts so that that love for Him is never released or awakened.

God is our ultimate creator of our soul and he has given our parents the ability to share in His creation of our physical bodies. So, they share our creation with God, and like our love for God is built into us so is our love for our parents already built into us. So, God cannot command us to love our parents, but like Him, He cannot command us to resist the scraping of our hearts to release that love. God knew that the child-parent relationship would be complex and that there would be times a child would harden their hearts toward one or both parents. Unlike God, the child might have a good reason not to love their parents. That is particularly if that child was abused or molested by the parent. Parents are human and sometimes that fallen nature could make a parent very unloving and difficult for a child to release that love that God planted within them.

Thus, God understood the fallen nature of man and that parents will fail and many will not deserve the love of the child, so God does not command children to love their parents but He does command them to honor them.

The word honor in Hebrew is surprising, it is the word kavod which is the word for glory. It means to be weighty. In one respect that is bearing a burden of a weighty issue. In other words, honoring our parents go beyond childhood, it takes us into their old age where we bear their burdens when they become too infirmed to carry their burdens. As a bus driver for the disabled, I see adult children obeying this command all the time. Just yesterday I drove an elderly woman who was blind to the University of Illinois Medical Center for the visually impaired. Her son went with her. I jumped out of the bus to help her on the bus but realized it would have been a mistake for me to help this woman with her son there. For this son was obeying the fifth commandment and honoring his blind mother by helping her in the bus, reassuring her, and carefully making sure she was strapped in. It was my legal duty to help this woman, but it was this son’s duty to honor his mother and my employer would have no problem at all if I stepped back and let her son take care of her.

The word kavod also means to be important. We are to always recognize the importance of our parents, no matter how good or bad they are, they have a connection to us and we recognize their importance to us. That involves always showing them respect just as we show God’s respect and recognized the importance of God in our life.

There are many reasons why honoring our parents will result in a long life. For me, their instruction kept me away from the dangers of life. Now that I am entering the seventh decade of my life I just left a doctor’s appointment where I realized that I am troubled by a life of tobacco, alcohol, drugs or other abuse to my body which could have ended my life many years ago. I have my parents to thank for that, I have them to thank for my long life.

I have something else to thank them for. By obeying the fifth commandment which served as a bridge between God and man they helped me to establish that bridge to God that has to lead to my eternal life with God. They planted a love for God in me that led to my surrender to God so that I was not only blessed with a long life here on earth but an eternal life with the God they loved and passed that love on to me.

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