Courageous Joy

Jewish View of Childhood - sort of a side trip.

Brief notes:

In Jewish society life was divided into three stages: childhood, young adult, adult.

In childhood one was not considered to be responsible for moral choices such as choosing God. There are several words used for this phase. There is one specifically for children under the age of 5 (typically this is translated as nursing babe). This phase obviously began at birth {snort - still with me?} and ended around 12.

Young Adult - A child is meant to transition from being a child to being an adult. The whole teenager thing (with the phases that we are told are aboslute were invented after WW2). A Young Adult knows that he is in training to be an adult. He is transitioning from childhood to adult. I've written about this often....a great article that changed our views of the whole "teen years" is The Myth of the Teenager by Michael Platt. This article gave us GREAT hope as our oldest approached the teen years and others were constantly telling us that she WOULD rebel and that a child MUST rebel in order to make their faith their own. What???? This article is worth a read, it's worth printing out and saving...it's been around a long time. We read it when Bre was a 5th grader and she is 21 now. This phase seems to have lasted from 12 - 17 or 21 depending on the sources I read.

Adult - the phase when a person has been fully trained and is responsible for moral choices and is marrying and having a family. (Not that all must but Jewish culture seems to have assumed this was the mark of adulthood).

There are LOTS of Hebrew and Greek words translated as CHILD in the Bible...we'll look at one more in-depth as we study the rod verses in Proverbs. English simply says "child" but the Hebrew word choices are very specific.