The higher studies were reserved for the priestly class, who, long before the Christian era, successfully cultivated rhetoric and logic, astronomy and the mathematics. 8. EDUCATION AMONG THE ISRAELITES.--“If ever a people has demonstrated the power of education, it is the people of Israel.”[10] In fact, what a singular spectacle is offered us by that people, which, dispossessed of its own country for eighteen hundred years, has been dispersed among the nations without losing its identity, and has maintained its existence without a country, without a government, and without a ruler, preserving with perennial energy its habits, its manners, and its faith! Without losing sight of the part of that extraordinary vitality of the Jewish people, which is due to the natural endowments of the race, its tenacity of temperament, and its wonderful activity of intelligence, it is just to attribute another part of it to the sound education, at once religious and national, which the ancient Hebrews have transmitted by tradition to their descendants. 9. EDUCATION, RELIGIOUS AND NATIONAL, DURING THE PRIMITIVE PERIOD.--The chief characteristic of the education of the Hebrews in the earliest period of their history is that it was essentially domestic. During the whole Biblical period there is no trace of public schools, at least for young children. Family life is the origin of that primitive society where the notion of the state is almost unknown, and where God is the real king. The child was to become the faithful servant of Jehovah. To this end it was not needful that he should be learned. It was only necessary that he should learn through language and the instructive example of his parents the moral precepts and the religious beliefs of the nation. It has been very justly said[11] that “among all nations the direction impressed on education depends on the idea which they form of the perfect man. Among the Romans it is the brave soldier, inured to fatigue, and readily yielding to discipline; among the Athenians it is the man who unites in himself the happy harmony of moral and physical perfection; among the Hebrews the perfect man is the pious, virtuous man, who is capable of attaining the ideal traced by God himself in these terms: ‘Ye shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy!’”[12] The discipline was harsh, as is proved by many passages in the Bible: “He that spareth his rod, hateth his son,” say the Proverbs; “but he that loveth him chasteneth him betimes.”[13] “Withhold not correction from the child, for if thou beatest him with the rod, he shall not die. Thou shalt beat him with the rod, and shalt deliver his soul from hell.”[14] And still more significant: “Chasten thy son while there is hope, and let not thy soul spare for his crying.”[15] Only boys, it seems, learned to read and write. As to girls, they were taught to spin, to weave, to prepare food for the table, to superintend the work of the household, and also to sing and to dance.