Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.
Proverbs 22:6 (KJV)
It guarantees nothing, and the people who most need to hear that are holding it on a bad night. Read as a promise, it carries a second clause nobody prints: if he departed, you did not train him.
A father, and the verse I gave him
A man sat in the small room down the hall some years ago and told me his son had stopped believing and had said so plainly, without a fight, over a meal.
I gave him this verse. I meant it kindly, and I meant the part about when he is old, the long game, the door left open. I watched it land as a charge sheet. He worked it through in front of me, out loud, because there is only one way to read it. The boy departed. The training must have failed. The man in the chair is the reason. I had handed a grieving father a sentence and he had read the invoice on the back of it.
Afterwards I went and read the sentence properly.
Two words were supplied, and a third was chosen
The Hebrew behind that first line is very short. Train, child, and then a small phrase that the King James renders as in the way he should go.
The King James translators knew they had filled a gap there, and they said so on the margin of the 1611 edition. Against that phrase the note reads: Heb. in his way. There is no should in the Hebrew, and no go. The phrase is al pi darko, word for word according to the mouth of his way, and idiomatically just according to his way. The King James filled the gap with should go.
The same margin carries a second note, on the first two words. Against train up it offers: Or, catechize. And the Hebrew verb there, chanak, appears four other times in the Old Testament, where the King James gives it dedicate every time: a new house, twice, in Deuteronomy, and the temple, in Kings and in Chronicles. Proverbs 22:6 is the only place it becomes train up, and you dedicate a house without guaranteeing what happens inside it.
The line therefore says to train a child according to his way, and readers have argued for centuries about whose way is meant. It may be the way suited to the particular child in front of you, which makes the verse a caution against raising every child by one method. A few readers have taken it the other direction, as a warning that a child left to his own way will keep it. The Hebrew does not say the thing on the nursery wall.
Samuel’s sons did not walk in his ways
The clearest test of the verse as a guarantee is in the history books, and it belongs to the man who anointed Israel’s first two kings.
And his sons walked not in his ways, but turned aside after lucre, and took bribes, and perverted judgment.
1 Samuel 8:3 (KJV)
The word translated ways there is derek, the same word standing behind way in Proverbs 22:6. Samuel’s boys did not walk in the derek. This is a man who had been given to the Lord as a child, who heard God speak by name, and who tells the nation a few chapters later that he would count it a sin against God to stop praying for them and that he will teach them the good and the right way. His own two took bribes in Beersheba.
There is a second case, and it belongs to a king. Hezekiah tore down the high places and cleaned out the temple, and 2 Kings says there was none like him among all the kings of Judah, a notice only Josiah matches. His son Manasseh reigned fifty-five years and did evil after the abominations of the nations God had driven out, so the reformer produced the worst king on the list. It runs the other way as well: Manasseh’s son Amon did evil as his father had, and Amon’s son was Josiah, who got the other notice.
Eli is judged, and Scripture says why
Eli’s sons were worthless men, and Eli is judged for it, which looks at first like the proverb working in reverse.
Scripture does not leave the reason vague. God says the house will be judged “because his sons made themselves vile, and he restrained them not,” in 1 Samuel 3:13, and the King James margin gives the Hebrew of that last phrase as frowned not upon them. Eli is not condemned for failing to produce an outcome. He is condemned for watching it happen and not stopping it, which was an act of his own.
Ezekiel says it out loud
The soul that sinneth, it shall die. The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son: the righteousness of the righteous shall be upon him, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon him.
Ezekiel 18:20 (KJV)
That sentence is doing exactly what the misread proverb undoes. A grown child’s choices are his own, and the verse says the father does not carry them.
What parents are actually commanded is older than Proverbs and has no outcome attached to it at all. Teach them diligently, says Deuteronomy, and talk about them sitting in the house and walking on the road and lying down and getting up. Four settings, one practice, and not one word about what the child will do with it later. The command is about the house being full of the thing, at meals and on the road and at either end of the day, a description of a life and not a method with a result attached.
A proverb tells you how life generally runs, which the book itself demonstrates on purpose. Generally, children raised in a thing keep it, and Samuel’s did not. The man in that room had raised a son who then did something a son is able to do, which is not the same event as a parent failing an exam.