In the 1660s Samuel Butler wrote a comic poem in which a widow teases a suitor, and he gave her the line that stuck: “Love is a boy by poets stil’d; Then spare the rod and spoil the child.” No, the rhyme is not in the Bible. Butler made it famous as a joke about Cupid. Proverbs 13:24 is close, and it speaks as a proverb.
A joke about a suitor
Butler’s satire is called Hudibras. By its second part the knight of the title is trying to talk a widow into marrying him. She tells him he will have to be whipped for her sake first, and then she reaches for her argument.
Love is a boy by poets stil’d; Then spare the rod and spoil the child.
Samuel Butler, Hudibras, Part II, Canto I
Poets picture Love as a boy, Cupid, so the child who must not be spared the rod is Love itself, and the one to be whipped is the grown suitor. The couplet was a joke about courtship. Later it reached church lobbies as advice about raising children, the way a proverb the preacher John Wesley once quoted came to be taken for a verse.
What Proverbs does say
Leaving this part out is how the rhyme keeps its grip, so here it is.
He that spareth his rod hateth his son: but he that loveth him chasteneth him betimes.
Proverbs 13:24 (KJV)
Proverbs has the rod in nine verses of the King James. Four passages put it in a parent’s hand: 13:24, 22:15, 23:13-14 and 29:15. The rest are about a fool’s back, a fool’s proud mouth, a man void of understanding, and the anger of a man who sows iniquity. Outside Proverbs, in 2 Samuel 7:14 God promises to chasten David’s son “with the rod of men,” and Sirach, a book in Catholic and Orthodox Bibles but not in most Protestant ones, says the same thing about a son in chapter 30.
The English word covers more than one kind of stick. It is the shepherd’s rod that comforts in Psalm 23:4, “thy rod and thy staff they comfort me,” and the master’s rod that strikes in Exodus 21:20, where a man who beats a servant to death “shall be surely punished.” In Proverbs the setting decides, and in the hardest passage it is plainly striking.
Withhold not correction from the child: for if thou beatest him with the rod, he shall not die. Thou shalt beat him with the rod, and shalt deliver his soul from hell.
Proverbs 23:13-14 (KJV)
The word printed as hell
In verse fourteen, hell means the grave. The King James prints the same word as the grave in Genesis 37:35, where Jacob says he will “go down into the grave unto my son mourning.” The World English Bible prints Sheol in both, the place of the dead. The couplet is about a son who might die young on a bad road, and a father who would rather have him alive. It is not a promise about damnation, and nobody can honestly use it to tell a parent who does not spank that her children are bound for hell.
If you were hurt this way as a child, or someone is being hurt at home now, the Childhelp National Child Abuse Hotline in the United States can help: call or text 1-800-422-4453.
A command inside a book of proverbs
Proverbs 23:13-14 is a command, among what 22:17 calls “the words of the wise,” and 19:18 is just as direct: “Chasten thy son while there is hope, and let not thy soul spare for his crying.” The Bible is not silent on this, and it would not be truthful to pretend it is.
The book also tells you how it works. According to 1:4 it was written “to give subtilty to the simple, to the young man knowledge and discretion,” and in 26:4-5 it prints two opposite sayings about answering a fool, one under the other. A proverb, even one that gives a command, tells you what is usually true, and working out which one the day in front of you calls for is the job. It does not tell any parent where the line falls in their own house.
The father in Hebrews
Hebrews 12 quotes Proverbs 3:11-12 to Christians who are suffering. Where the King James Proverbs has “even as a father the son in whom he delighteth,” Hebrews 12:6 has “scourgeth every son whom he receiveth.” Then it sets two fathers side by side. Earthly fathers “chastened us after their own pleasure,” which in 1611 English means as they judged best, and they were still given “reverence”; God does it “for our profit, that we might be partakers of his holiness,” in verses 9 and 10. The father whose discipline is always for our good is God, and the writer does not pretend ours are like him.
What Paul tells fathers
When Paul speaks to fathers about their children, he starts by telling them not to provoke their children to anger. “Fathers, provoke not your children to anger, lest they be discouraged,” he writes to Colossae in 3:21. To Ephesus he says the same, and then says what to do instead: bring them up “in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.” That means bringing them up with the training and correction that come from the Lord, without provoking them or wearing them down until they lose heart.
So when the rhyme gets quoted at you, ask which thing is being defended: a joke from a satire, or a proverb that has to be weighed. And hold every rod in the Bible next to the first words Paul gives a father.
And, ye fathers, provoke not your children to wrath: but bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.
Ephesians 6:4 (KJV)