Originally Posted by gpsings (Post 3559950)

What does the Holy Spirit tell you? Does it make sense to you that a loving God would want you to beat your child with a rod?
I hope this isn't coming across wrong, but I think it's important that we listen to the Holy Spirit when trying to interpret His word. Then we can consider how it's been translated and taught and discern which is right.
:hug2

Originally Posted by BarefootBetsy (Post 3570965)

Wow. "Significant merit" :happytears

*must finish next post this weekend - the sicknesses coming to my family will not stop me!!!*

Originally Posted by BarefootBetsy (Post 3570581)

Well, it takes a long time to go through even just five verses and figure out what all the main words could mean in Hebrew and look at all the different ways they've been translated in English over the years and puzzle out the various ways they could be interpreted... I can understand why not everyone would want to do that when the "rod" verses have such an established meaning already.

But I'd think that doing such a thing would be something a teacher *should* be doing before they teach about it. It really is disturbing that so few (read: almost none) actually bother to do anything remotely like a word/context study on certain passages (not just these) because they just accept what the popular interpretation is without question. They might do it on other passages where the consensus is a little shakier, but since everyone seems to agree that the rod verses mean spanking... who's going to question it? IMO, until and unless we shake that consensus enough for people to actually need to revisit it, almost nobody will.