Raising Children

Reading these passages

The verse at the top of this page is the one every parent has heard, and it is also the one scholars have never agreed on. The disagreement is not about a shade of meaning. It is about whether the verse is encouragement or warning.

Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.

The Hebrew phrase behind in the way he should go is al-pi darko — literally "according to the mouth of his way." There is no word for should in it. The King James supplied one, as most English versions do, and that single supplied word carries the reading almost everyone knows: there is a right path, and the parent's job is to set the child on it.

But darko is possessive — his way. A second reading takes it that way: train a child according to his own way, meaning his temperament, his bent, the particular grain of the particular child. On this reading the proverb is not about a universal path at all. It is about paying attention to which child you have.

A third reading, older than it sounds, takes the whole thing as a warning. Let a child have his own way, and when he is old he will not depart from that either. Proverbs is a book that says hard things drily, and nothing in the Hebrew rules this out.

These readings are not compatible with each other, and this page is not going to pick between them. What is worth knowing is that the familiar one depends on a word that is not in the sentence.

What training meant

The verb is chanak, and it is rare — applied to a person only here. Elsewhere it is what you do to a building. Solomon's temple was chanak-ed; the festival of Hanukkah takes its name from the same root, and it commemorates the rededication of a defiled temple rather than the raising of a new one.

So the word is about consecration — setting something apart for the use it was made for — rather than about drill or instruction. Some lexicons add a further sense from the Arabic cognate, where the root describes a midwife rubbing crushed dates on a newborn's palate to start it sucking. Whether that meaning was live in Hebrew is disputed. But both senses point the same direction: something done at the beginning to start a thing off, not a programme administered over years.

Promise or proverb

The second half is where the pastoral damage happens. And when he is old, he will not depart from it.

Read as a promise, that sentence tells a parent whose adult child has walked away from the faith that the fault is traceable, and theirs. A great many people have been told exactly that, sometimes by their own congregation.

Read as a proverb, it says what proverbs say: this is how life generally runs. The same book observes that the diligent become rich and that a soft answer turns away wrath — both reliably true, both with exceptions anyone can name. Scripture itself supplies the counter-examples. Samuel was raised in the tabernacle and his own sons took bribes. Hezekiah was among the best kings Judah had, and his son Manasseh among the worst.

Christians divide here, and the division is real rather than a case of one side reading carelessly. Some hold that a promise in scripture is a promise, and that the apparent failures are unfinished rather than final. Some hold that Proverbs belongs to a genre trading in tendencies, and that reading it as a guarantee misuses the book. The two positions produce very different pastoral care, which is why this argument matters more than a textual dispute usually does.

Sharpened

Deuteronomy describes something more modest and more relentless: And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up.

Teach diligently is one Hebrew word, shanan, and its ordinary meaning is to sharpen — to whet a blade, to hone an edge. It is used of arrows, of swords, and of a tongue sharp enough to wound. The image is repetition against a surface until something takes an edge.

The four settings are a merism, a way of saying "all of it" by naming the extremes: sitting and walking, lying down and rising up, which is a whole day from before it starts to after it ends. Nothing here is scheduled. There is no lesson, no hour set aside, no curriculum.

And the verse before it puts the material somewhere first: And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be in thine heart. In the parent, then in the conversation. The order is not decorative — a passage that describes teaching as constant, unplanned talk has to assume the teacher already holds the thing, because there is no preparation time built into the picture.

The instruction to fathers

And, ye fathers, provoke not your children to wrath: but bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.

The Greek addressed here is pateres, ordinarily fathers, though the same plural covers Moses' mother and father together in Hebrews, where the King James renders it parents. Which Paul intends is arguable. In a first-century household the instruction lands hardest on the father either way, because he was the one holding the power the verse restricts.

That is the part worth noticing. Roman law gave a father authority over his household that extended, formally, to life and death. Into that, Paul writes a limit — and the limit is not about the child's obedience but about the father's effect. What is being regulated is the exercise of power by the person who has it.

Nurture and admonition are paideia and nouthesia. The first is the whole Greek concept of bringing up a child, discipline and education together, the shaping of a person. The second is narrower and gentler than admonition now sounds: it is correction by word, putting something in someone's mind. Neither term is primarily about punishment, though paideia includes it.

A nurse, and a letter that may not belong

Paul reaches for a parent when he wants to describe how he treated a church, and the sentence contains one of the better-known textual problems in the New Testament: But we were gentle among you, even as a nurse cherisheth her children.

Gentle is epioi. But a substantial body of manuscripts reads nepioi — infants — and the difference is a single letter, one that the preceding word happens to end with, so a scribe could have doubled it or dropped it without noticing. The manuscript evidence slightly favours infants; the sense strongly favours gentle, since Paul goes on in the same breath to compare himself to a woman nursing, and being an infant and a nursing mother at once is a hard image to hold.

Editors have split on it for two centuries. It is a useful reminder that the text of the New Testament is known to a very high degree of certainty and not to a total one, and that the places where it is uncertain are mostly like this one: small, visible, and argued about in the open.

Nurse is trophos, a woman feeding a child at the breast — her own or one in her care. Four verses later Paul changes figures without apology and says he dealt with them as a father doth his children. He is not being careful about which parent. He reaches for whichever one carries the weight of the sentence he is writing.

Of such

Mark records one of the few occasions the gospels describe Jesus as angry, and the trigger is small: But when Jesus saw it, he was much displeased, and said unto them, Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God.

Much displeased is aganakteo, indignation — the same word used of the other disciples when James and John ask for the best seats. And the disciples here were, on any sensible reading, doing their job. Children could not follow a teacher, could not repay a favour, and could not be counted in a crowd. Turning them away was crowd management.

Note also that of such is not "of these." The Greek toiouton means of this kind, this sort — which widens the sentence past the children in front of him to anyone in their position. The verse after it makes the direction of travel explicit, and it is the opposite of the one usually assumed: adults are told to receive the kingdom as a little child does, not children told to grow into it.

Psalm 127 puts a related thought in the language of property: Lo, children are an heritage of the Lord: and the fruit of the womb is his reward. An inheritance is the one form of wealth nobody earns. And the psalm opens by dismantling the alternative — Except the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it — before arriving at children, which suggests the placement is an argument rather than a change of subject.

What remains is Proverbs 1:8, quietly unusual for its time: My son, hear the instruction of thy father, and forsake not the law of thy mother. The word behind law is torah — the word for what was given at Sinai, here belonging to the mother, in a culture that recorded almost nothing women taught. Thirty chapters later the book closes with a passage a king says his mother taught him. Whatever else Proverbs assumes about a household, it does not assume the teaching came from one parent.