“honour your father and mother”

The word

Kabad (כָּבַד) is a verbal root that runs through the Hebrew Bible in several stems with related meanings:

• Kal stem: to be heavy, to be weighty
• Piel stem: to honour, to give weight to
• Hiphil stem: to make heavy, to harden (as in “Pharaoh hardened his heart”)

The cognate noun kavod (כָּבוֹד) — glory, honour, weight — runs through the same semantic field. The “glory of the LORD” (kavod YHWH) is the LORD’s weighty presence — that which has substance, weight, significance.

To “honour” someone in this Hebrew sense is to give weight to them — to treat them as substantial and significant, not to disregard or minimise them.

The commandment in context

Exodus 20:12 (BSB):

Honour your father and mother, so that your days may be long in the land that the LORD your God is giving you.

Deuteronomy 5:16 (BSB) — the parallel:

Honour your father and your mother, as the LORD your God has commanded you, so that your days may be long, and that it may go well with you in the land that the LORD your God is giving you.

The commandment is in the Decalogue, addressed to the Israelite covenant community as a whole. The “you” is grammatically singular but functions as a corporate-individual address — every Israelite is included.

The adult-children dimension

In the ancient Near Eastern legal world, “honouring” parents primarily addressed the obligations of adult children — those with means and standing — toward their elderly parents:

• Financial support — providing for parents who could no longer work
• Protection — defending parents’ standing within the community
• Avoidance of cursing or striking — explicit penalties for these acts in the same legal corpus (Exodus 21:15, 17 prescribe death for striking or cursing one’s parents)
• Burial — ensuring parents received proper burial

The commandment is not primarily about young children obeying their parents (although that application is downstream). It addresses the adult life cycle — what happens when parents become old, vulnerable, dependent on their adult children’s resources.

Jesus’s reference in Mark 7

Jesus’s teaching in Mark 7:9-13 (BSB) reads the commandment in this register:

For Moses said, “Honour your father and your mother,” and, “Anyone who curses his father or mother must be put to death.” But you say that if a man tells his father or mother, “Whatever you would have received from me is Corban” (that is, a gift devoted to God), then he is no longer permitted to do anything for his father or mother. Thus you nullify the word of God by the tradition you have handed down.

The “honour” Jesus is defending is concrete economic support of parents. Some Pharisaic practice allowed adult children to declare resources “Corban” — devoted to the temple — and thereby avoid using them to support their parents. Jesus reads the commandment as primarily addressing this real economic obligation, not abstract respect.

What gets lost in modern usage

When “honour your father and mother” is read in modern English as a commandment to children — be respectful, obey your parents — the original legal-economic dimension recedes. The commandment in its setting addressed an adult’s obligation to elderly, dependent parents. Some of that meaning still operates in modern usage; some of it has been displaced by the nursery-school version.