Deuteronomy 1:39

The context

Moses is retelling the spy episode at Kadesh, where the people refused to enter the land and God sentenced that generation to die in the wilderness. The verse names the children as those who will enter instead. It is part of Moses' speech on the plains of Moab, looking back over forty years.

What it establishes

The verse draws a distinction between the generation that refused and their children, and it describes the children as not yet knowing good and evil. Judgment is therefore not indiscriminate across the whole people.

What it does not establish

It does not define an age of accountability. The phrase is a description of the very young in a narrative about national judgment, and it supplies no threshold, no doctrine of infant salvation, and no rule for how God judges the unaware.

Short note, first pass, October 2026. Corrections welcome.

Cited in these answers

• So all infants and children who have ever lived and died as non-Christians are sentenced by God to suffer eternally in hell? That's kind and 'all-loving'.

Part of Scripture, Opened — the exegetical layer behind every citation on this site. Scripture quotations are from the ESV.