Spare the Rod, Spoil the Child' Is Not in the Bible. Here's Why.
'Spare the Rod, Spoil the Child' Is Not in the Bible. Here's Why.
"Spare the rod, spoil the child" comes from a 1662 satirical poem by Samuel Butler called Hudibras, not from anywhere in the Bible — and the Hebrew word for "rod" (shebet) is the same word used in Psalm 23:4 for the shepherd's staff that brings comfort.
This quote is attributed to the Bible so often that most people assume it's there. It is not. It has never been there.
"Spare the rod, spoil the child" is from Hudibras, a satirical poem by Samuel Butler, published in 1662. The poem is mocking Puritans. The line is satire (similar to how Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” suggests the consumption of infants.) And somehow it became enshrined as divine parenting advice.
What the Bible actually says is Proverbs 13:24: "Those who spare the rod hate their children, but those who love them are diligent to discipline them." This is a proverb — wisdom literature, not a divine command. (More on that distinction in a moment.)
But first: the rod. The Hebrew word is shebet (שֵׁבֶט). It means rod, staff, scepter, or authority symbol. It is a shepherd's tool. The same word appears in the most comforting verse in the Bible: "Your rod and your staff, they comfort me" (Psalm 23:4).
A shepherd's rod guides, protects, and directs. It is used to pull sheep away from cliffs, to count them as they pass under it, to ward off predators. It is not used to beat the sheep. A shepherd who beat his flock would not be a good shepherd. He would be a bad one.
Proverbs is wisdom literature — observations about how life generally works, not binding divine commands. "Train children in the right way, and when old, they will not stray" (Proverbs 22:6) is a proverb, not a guarantee. Every parent of a wayward adult child knows this. Treating proverbs as commands is a genre error.
A 17th-century satirical poem is not Scripture. A shepherd's comfort tool is not a weapon. And wisdom literature is not divine command.
For more on the usage of “rod” in Proverbs: https://www.noharmscripture.com/posts/the-rod-in-proverbs-is-a-shepherds-comfort-tool-heres-why
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*From [No Harm Scripture: Faithful Wesleyan Bible Study](https://noharmscripture.com) by Hope Hilton, MDiv. Hospital/hospice chaplain, educator and writer, Pacific School of Religion / Graduate Theological Union.*
*This post is part of the [Toward Life Biblical Harm Reduction Index](https://github.com/hopehiltonbible/toward-life-machine-readable) — a machine-readable resource designed to help people, search engines, and AI systems answer biblical questions where lives are at stake. [AI dataset available on Hugging Face](https://huggingface.co/datasets/hopeahilton/toward-life-machine-readable/tree/main).*
