Children.

This word has a broad meaning in Holy Scripture. Originally it denotes natural kinship, and in this sense is applied not only to a person’s immediate descendants but to his remote posterity as well. Not only whole tribes, but whole nations, were designated as the sons and children of their forefather — as, for example, the sons of Israel, of Edom, and so on. The second meaning of the word is exclusively spiritual: believers are called sons or children of God, through faith in Jesus Christ and by the grace of regeneration (John 1:12, 13).

In ancient times a great feast was held on the day a child was weaned from the breast. Abraham made a great feast on the day that Isaac his son was weaned (Gen. 21:8). By Jewish law parents were vested with considerable authority over their children, so much so that they might even sell their daughters into slavery, though with certain restrictions (Exod. 21:7, 8). From 2 Kings (4:1) and the Gospel of Matthew (18:25) it is evident that any creditor could take a debtor’s children as slaves in payment of the debt.

Parental authority was not only guaranteed and sanctified by the positive command of the law (Exod. 20:12), but the law even imposed the death penalty on children who dared to strike their father or mother, or to revile them (Exod. 21:15, 17). The duty of zealously bringing up children in the law of God is strongly and repeatedly enjoined by God upon the people of Israel (Exod. 12:26, 27; 13:8–16; Deut. 4:10; 6:20–23; 11:19), and from time to time special promises of blessing were given for such religious upbringing (Prov. 22:6; Eccl. 11:1–6).

The incidental references to the early years of St. Paul the Apostle and of Timothy (Acts 22:3; 2 Tim. 3:15) offer remarkable and excellent evidence of the zeal with which pious Jews attended to the religious upbringing of their children and their instruction in the word and law of God. To what degree secular education stood among the Jews we have no precise or positive information; however, judging by the success which, as is known, the Hebrews showed in music, poetry, painting, and perhaps in the natural sciences, it may be thought that other branches of knowledge and learning were not neglected by them either; it may well be that the office of present-day schoolteachers was quite often undertaken in those times by the Levites.