That he be called a “boy” for age’s sake, the [things] hitherto explained about his deeds seem to hinder. For would Moses have set a boy, or a stripling, over a most difficult war against very many and most fierce enemies? Would a boy of so small and weak an age have been enrolled, the next year, in the number of the spies? Abulensis indeed (after q. 23 on Exodus 32) thinks he was passing at this time about his fortieth year; Masius (in the second preface) [about his] fortieth; and from the last chapter of Joshua (v. 9 [24:29]), where, when he was 110 years old, he dies, it has no small probability. St. Augustine (book 18 to Marcellinus [City of God], ch. 11) seems to give him now 43 years — since, after Moses’s death, or the 40 years of the desert, he ruled only 27 years. R. Solomon [Rashi] gives him now 52 years; and likewise, in agreement, Brugthronus, 53. But “puer” sometimes signifies “servant,” as I have shown at length on Tobias ch. 9, and [as] is clearly plain [from] Psalm 112 [113]. For where the Hebrew has “Praise, [ye] servants,” our [Latin has] “Praise the Lord, ye children [pueri].” Matthew [8, v. 6]: “Behold my puer,” [where the] Hebrew [has] “behold my servant.” Moses [is called] παῖς τοῦ κυρίου, that is, “servant” (Joshua [1:1]); Numbers 14, v. 24; ὁ παῖς τοῦ Χριστοῦ; Isaiah [37:35], “for David my servant”; Genesis 20, v. 14, and ch. 24, vv. 5, 11, 40, 43, 44, 45. Some, therefore, will have Joshua called “puer” because he ministered to Moses — as Abulensis. But they are refuted by the very context, in which “his minister” had already been set down; and in so few and brief [words]…
(col. 131)
…[in so few and brief words] it would be an inept tautology, through [redundant] words. Then, it makes a very great difference [whether] you say someone is “someone’s boy [puer],” or, precisely, “a boy.” The former imports a relation, either to a father or to a master; the latter [does] not. In two ways, therefore, I think he is called “puer.” 1. [So] that “boy” may signify a young man. For [it is] a [word] of this kind that the Hebrew name here set down, naar [נער], and the Greek neos, properly denote. Catullus, on the virgin flower:
Many boys, many girls desired him.
And afterward: “Nor does he remain pleasing to boys.” And because, from “helping” [iuvando], those called iuvenes [young men] hold that name up to the 45th year — as Varro says (in Censorinus, book On the Birthday, ch. 13). But often to those who are otherwise young men is given the name of “boys” or “youths” — as when, toward the end of the book On Friendship, Cicero calls Laelius’s sons-in-law “adolescentes,” “very young men”; [and] in the book On the Canvass for the Consulship he says [that] to obtain this [office] the “young men” [adolescentuli] lend their vigor, and numbers these same [men] among the iuventus; in the book On Duties, when he had said that “some [are] the duties of the young [iuvenum], others of the elders,” he at once names those [young men] “adolescentes” — “It is therefore [the part],” he says, “of an adolescens to revere his elders by birth”; and in book 2, when, after the first age, he had said [that] those who had “begun to be iuvenes” ought to look to great things, he at once explains it of “adolescentes”: “The first commendation, therefore, of a young man [adolescens] unto glory [is], if any can be got from military affairs.” The Virgilian Tityrus, Meliboeus calls “a fortunate old man”; and yet to him Augustus said (in the eclogue), “Feed, boys [pueri], your oxen as before.” To Horace, Trebatius (book 2, Satire 1): “O boy [puer], I fear for you, that you may not be long-lived.” What Jeremiah said (ch. 1), “I am a boy [puer],” St. Jerome expounds (on Isaiah ch. 2) as “that is, a young man.” Genesis 41, v. 12: “There was there a young Hebrew [puer]” — Joseph, namely, who [was] then 30 years old (ibid., v. 46). Isaiah 3, v. 4: “I will give boys [pueros] to be their princes”; and v. 5, “the boy [puer] against the old man.” And thus already above (ch. 3, q. 6, and ch. 4, q. 1) I called Joshua a “young man.” 2. He was a “boy” by innocence, modesty, and the candor of all his morals — just as I expounded that [passage] of Saul (1 Kings [Samuel] 13, v. 1), “Saul was the son of one year when he began to reign.” Cassian (ch. 4, Conference 15): “Abbot Abraham,” he says, “is surnamed talya [טליא] — that is, ‘simple’ — for the simplicity of his morals and [his] innocence.” Yet the former exposition [is] more agreeable to the text.