![]() Yet how do these texts relate to our passage? All of them involve the initiation of things, but our passage is speaking about the initiation of a person. Similarly, the eight occurrences of the noun related to our verb all involve dedicating or initiating something in the religious worship of Israel: either an altar or a temple. It may also indicate consecrating something for a particular use. Clearly, the verb involves a celebration marking the use of something for the first time. The four other occurrences of this verb in the Old Testament appear in contexts of dedicating or initiating the use of buildings (Deuteronomy 20:5, 1 Kings 8:63 and 2 Chronicles 7:5). He says the word means to dedicate / initiate: Peter Gentry points out the word “train up” does not mean to train. There are other legitimate translations for it. Those that presuppose parents must train children in a certain way (supposedly God’s way) interpret this verse as a method (train the child in the way he must be trained) and as a promise (if you’ve trained the child in God’s way, then he will not depart from the faith).Īnother way this passage has been translated is, “Train a child according to his natural bent and he will not deviate from it.” A third translation is, “Train up a child the way he wants to go, he will not deviate from that.” To complicate things even further, the Masoretic text reads, “Enoch for a child according to his way even when he is old (like Methuselah) he will not depart from it.” Over the years, I’ve read various Bible commentaries and comments in Christian child training books. ![]() Proverbs 22:6 is an excellent example of how unclear the original Hebrew language can be. Tradition says this verse means, train a child in the way he’s supposed to be trained (the Bible and Christian way) then he will grow up to be a good Christian. It says, “Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it” (King James Version). Before diving into the seven key verses, let’s begin with the most well-known and quoted verse, Proverbs 22:6. What about those key verses in Proverbs? Aren’t they about how to parent? The Bible is about the good news of Jesus Christ ( Luke 24:27). That is because the Bible is not a manual and is not about parenting. Even though the Bible has much to say about children and parents, it does not provide specific instructions for how parents raise their little children. A few examples can be seen in Deuteronomy 6:1-6, Ephesians 6:4, and Colossians 3:21. In fact, there is very little in the whole Bible that tells parents how to parent. It turns out Proverbs was not designed as a how-to yack-n-smack manual for raising compliant Christian children. Over the years, I put my findings in blog posts, which you can read here and here. One thing that stunned me was to learn that Proverbs is not a child training manual. Seven key verses in Proverbs command parents to spank, right? Or do they? Asking the question I had never asked before started me on a several-year journey to study what Proverbs was all about and what those verses really mean. And there are seven key verses that prove the necessity for teaching and spanking. After all, those commands come from God’s parenting manual, the book of Proverbs. Like a majority of Bible-oriented Christians, I believed God commands parents to spank and to be punitive. However, how could we reconcile what we believed as true with our changing perspective? How could we justify a kinder, gentler, more gracious way of parenting with all those commands in Proverbs to be punitive and to spank little children? We had to be faithful to what God says, right? What we knew was that we needed to err on the side of grace and not law. ![]() The paradigm shift from the yack and smack philosophy to a mercy and grace-based approach was needed but very hard. Then something woke us up in terms of how we should best parent. It was the means to making our children into better people and if possible, turning them into Christians. We believed smacking our children was the best way to train them not to do things we did not like and to train them to obey us in everything. ![]() We learned that the two main ways to parent children were to talk to them and spank them. Or do they?įor many years my wife and I believed in spanking children. 7 Verses in Proverbs Command Parents to Spank. ![]()
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