Quote:This is actually a fairly practical concept seeing as how average life expectancy was around 27-28. "Teenagers" in Jewish culture is a misnomer. They were adults. You are letting your ethnocentrism show.
Not just the Jews either. About 28-35 seems about right for males in preindustrial cultures( less for women) Puberty was considered the age of adulthood in most cultures at some point. The age of consent in the UK and the US was 12 until about 1920. Until the late C19th children as young as 12 were hanged or transported for life for a variety of crimes,usually against property.
Childhood was a sentimental invention of the Victorian bourgeoisie and did not extend to children of the working class until late in the C19th..
The Law of Moses has some suspicious similarities with the code of Hammurabi. It was probably quiet effective in controlling a small tribe of bronze age goat herders
.That Mosaic law is no longer appropriate can be seen the way Christians without exception cherry pick which of the 613 commandments they'll obey.The claim of literalists the Bible is the inerrant world of God bemuses me, especially as Jesus is recorded as admonishing his followers to keep The Law. It seems only required when convenient or practicable.
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Quote:Children as young as three were put to work. A high number of children also worked as prostitutes.[10] In coal mines children began work at the age of five and generally died before the age of 25. Many children (and adults) worked 16 hour days. As early as 1802 and 1819 Factory Acts were passed to regulate the working hours of workhouse children in factories and cotton mills to 12 hours per day. These acts were largely ineffective and after radical agitation, by for example the "Short Time Committees" in 1831, a Royal Commission recommended in 1833 that children aged 11–18 should work a maximum of 12 hours per day, children aged 9–11 a maximum of eight hours, and children under the age of nine were no longer permitted to work. This act however only applied to the textile industry, and further agitation led to another act in 1847 limiting both adults and children to 10 hour working days.[10]
By 1900, there were 1.7 million child labourers reported in American industry under the age of fifteen.[11] The number of children under the age of 15 who worked in industrial jobs for wages climbed to 2 million in 1910.[12]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_labour
