Lamentations 5:7

The present generation of Judeans was bearing the punishment for the sins that their fathers, who had long since died, had initiated. They had continued and increased the sins of their fathers. Jeremiah rejected the idea that God was punishing his generation solely because of the sins of former generations (Jeremiah 31:29-30). His contemporaries had brought the apostasy of earlier generations to its worst level, and now they were reaping its results.