Chap. iii.—Examples of youthful devotedness

Chap. iii.—Examples of youthful devotedness.

Moreover, the wise Daniel, while he was a young man, passed judgment on certain vigorous old men,[1998] showing them that they were abandoned wretches, and not [worthy to be reckoned] elders, and that, though Jews by extraction, they were Canaanites in practice. And Jeremiah, when on account of his youth he declined the office of a prophet entrusted to him by God, was addressed in these words: “Say not, I am a youth; for thou shalt go to all those to whom I send thee, and thou shalt speak according to all that I command thee; because I am with thee.”[1999] And the wise Solomon, when only in the twelfth year of his age,[2000] had wisdom to decide the important question concerning the children of the two women,[2001] when it was unknown to whom these respectively belonged; so that the whole people were astonished at such wisdom in a child, and venerated him as being not a mere youth, but a full-grown man. And he solved the hard questions of the queen of the Ethiopians, which had profit in them as the streams of the Nile [have fertility], in such a manner that that woman, though herself so wise, was beyond measure astonished.[2002]