By Kristine Henriksen Garroway and Shawn W. Flynn

 

Children often seem forgotten in history. They do not write literature, are rarely represented in art, and seem unimportant in the stories in which adults have larger roles. But over the past ten years there has been a renewed interest in ancient children.

We have been working to uncover children in the ancient biblical world. The reality is that evidence for children in ancient Israel is scant, so comparative data becomes important, especially material cultural and textual dimensions.

Growing Up in Ancient Israel: Children in Material Culture and Biblical Texts explores what it was like to grow up in the world of ancient Israel. Growing Up investigates conception, miscarriage, pregnancy, birth, infancy, and various aspects of the growing child’s life, such as play, dress, gender, dangers, and even death, through the textual and archaeological data.

Growing Up in Ancient Israel: Children in Material Culture and Biblical Texts

 

Tracing a child’s life in the ancient world seems like a daunting task. What did children do every day? What kind of toys did they play with? What did they look like? How were they gendered? What happened when they became ill and died? How did parents relate to their children? On the one hand, these questions are broad. We know from our own lives that each person experiences life differently. On the other hand, there are common variables that can be identified.

Since ancient Israel is described in only one major text, the Hebrew Bible, Growing Up uses archaeology as a companion source to portray the life of a child. Unfortunately, there are gaps, so the book also uses cross-cultural materials from the ancient Near East, as well as anthropological and ethnographical sources. Woven throughout each chapter are overarching questions: the value and vulnerability of a child, the importance of enculturation and gendering, and the use of material culture in constructing the world of the child.

The value parents placed on children can be seen in the lengths parents went to become pregnant (prayers, vows, oaths, and religio-medical remedies) and then protect that pregnancy. This value is not only tied to economics; a child’s value was also personal. For example, Rachel wishes to die rather than live a childless life, and King David weeps for his dying infant son. The desire for children and the reactions to their sickness and death are witness to the fact that untimely deaths are not welcomed. In the archaeological record we find houses peppered with amulets, lamps, and figurines meant to protect the pregnant woman and her child. Some rooms even seem to be intentionally “child-proofed,” free from objects that might harm the child.

Iron Age figurine from Lachish. (https://images.metmuseum.org/CRDImages/an/original/an34.126.53.jpg)

Khirbet el-Qom Tomb 1. William G. Dever 1969–1970. Iron Age Epigraphic Material from the Area of Khirbet El-Kôm. Hebrew Union College Annual 40–41: Figure 8, Plate VIA.

 

The burial record also shows time and energy invested in the creation of infant and child burials, and the inclusion of special grave goods. While burials can demonstrate the love and value a parent placed on a child’s life, the fragility of a child’s life is also a testament to the child’s inherent vulnerability. Demographic analyses of Israelite villages and cities do not correlate with the number of infants and children found in the burial record. Where are these missing bodies? The friable nature of their bones makes their burials lost to history.

Tied up with value and vulnerability is society’s desire to reproduce itself through properly enculturated children. Children must be taught how to be the next generation of Israelites. This socialization began at birth. Consider how parents both enculturated and gendered their boys through circumcision. Neighboring cultures handed infants items representative of their respective sexes; such a practice might also have occurred in ancient Israel. Naming was another instance in which gender and Israelite identity were impressed upon a child early in life. As children grew, other identifying markers were modeled for and taught to them. For example, boys and girls would learn how to carry out aspects of the domestic cult; girls might participate along with their mothers in baking cakes for the deities, and boys would learn from their fathers how to carry out rites for the cult of ancestors.

Investigating a child’s life means also exploring the world created for and by the child. While they were quite young, adults created items for children, such as sippy cups, slings or wraps for transporting the child, or amulets that were attached to their clothes. Clothing offers perspectives on gender as well as material culture. The Lachish reliefs provide an almost step-by-step guide for dressing wealthy Judean children as they grew from infants into young men and women.

Exiles leaving Lachish. (http://etc.ancient.eu/photos/siege-lachish-reliefs-british-museum/)

 

We know from biblical accounts that women made textiles, and ethnographic sources from Palestine and Iran show how women passed dressmaking skills on to their daughters. Other skills were also passed on to children either through formal apprenticeship, or informal observation and imitation during play. In ancient Israel, strangely shaped, handmade, miniature items, which mirror larger, wheel-made vessels, suggest evidence of child-made vessels. It even seems likely that children made their own toys and in doing so learned skills they could use later in life.

Growing Up in Ancient Israel only scratches the surface. It offers one method and shows how much can be found when examining material culture and texts with an eye to bringing children out of the shadows.

Children in Ancient Israel: The Hebrew Bible and Mesopotamia in Comparative Perspective studies children in the ancient Near East (primarily Mesopotamia) as a lens to better understand children in the Hebrew Bible. Mesopotamian data for each stage of a child’s life are broadly described, and help to read corresponding biblical texts. Children appear in prayers, mythology, letters, rituals, and burials, but those data illuminate a key question: were children simply considered economic contributors to domestic units, or is did they have a particular type of value?

Children in Ancient Israel: The Hebrew Bible and Mesopotamia in Comparative Perspective

 

For example, while Hebrew Bible texts about children in utero are rare (e.g., Jeremiah 1:4-5 and Psalm 139), Mesopotamian thought about the pre-born child is highly developed and well documented. Mesopotamian medical texts focus on the health and development of the foetus, prayers evoke the domestic deity for help during pregnancy and birth, while magic, and curse protections attempt to protect the unborn child. These tangible interventions are connected to domestic cult rituals in which the human midwife embodies the divine midwife during birth. The gods are thus involved in every human birth and have a special role in the domestic cult during these moments. Such emphases are then echoed in mythology and specifically in creation stories.

Sometimes the Hebrew Bible simply echoes its ancient context and at times does something slightly different. Consider the multiple examples of adoption and wet-nursing contracts from Mesopotamia. They suggest that breast-feeding by the birth mother could delay conception which was undesirable in a society with high infant mortality rates. Thus, to ensure more production of children, a wet-nurse could be employed. Likewise, adoption contracts lay out the responsibilities of both parents and the child to the new household unit. There is immense concern for ensuring the household unit functions well. All these data help us re-read biblical texts on children.

Moses’ infancy narrative draws widely on breastfeeding and adoption contracts. It uses the common language of adoption contracts, explores the bond between wet-nurse and child, includes details of the wet-nursing contract and payment, and even explores the religious role of midwives. Likewise, childhood abandonment language, a legal precursor to adoption, is employed in this biblical narrative. What is the purpose of utilizing an adoption contract to set up the book of Exodus? It seems the authors are intentionally using the value of children as a narrative frame to introduce YHWH’s relationship to Israel, perhaps highlighting the adoption of Israel.

Such comparative work must never reach beyond its claims. Rather than suggest that ancient Israelite scribes had specific access to texts about children from Mesopotamia, the data merely introduces a broad cultural matrix in which Israelite texts can be interpreted.

But the economic, cultic, and domestic value of children certainty does not mean children did not have difficult lives. High infant mortality rates, despite the care and concern, meant children died young. But we can also consider the burial evidence. Children were cared for in burials, in jars or tombs, and were often buried with essential grave goods. While specialized grave goods were reserved for those who reached a particular role in the household, children’s burials show concern for children in death and possibly in the afterlife. As one parent in the tale ‘Gilgamesh, Enkidu, and the Netherworld’ puts it: “Did you see my little still-born children who never knew themselves? I saw. How do they fare? They play at a table of gold and silver, (laden with) ghee and honey.”

Children also experienced violence, were sometimes slaves, and were even adopted only to transfer land. But there are often societal structures that engage such violence. For example, there were curses against pregnant mothers and their children but also curse protections. Likewise, childhood abandonment might occurred, but adoption was a societal response allowing children, even those with deformities, to serve in a household in which they could still be an economic contributor. Child sacrifice will always capture the popular imagination, has received important attention, and may have historical elements, but the extent to which it was practiced versus its rhetorical value must be considered.

By understanding the ancient value of children we can continue to look at biblical texts in new ways. Consider Genesis 22 and the famous sacrifice of Isaac. Knowing something of the child’s domestic-cultic value helps us appreciate the rhetorical effectiveness of the text. Isaac also has a relationship with the domestic deity from before he was born (Gen 17:19), during the moment of birth he is welcomed into the domestic cult with cultic rituals (Gen 21:3–8), and he will have an on-going relationship with the deity at this location that Abraham names (Gen 22:14). The loss of Isaac would be devastating to the domestic cult.

But how does one reconcile that value with the violence? As far as the Hebrew Bible is concerned it seems that violence threatening children also has a rhetorical purpose. For example, Psalm 137, and its difficult language of bashing the enemy’s children against the rocks, wants to communicate hatred against one’s captors, in order to convince those who had become comfortable in exile to hate their captors, or to characterize a foreign king as problematic (like 2 Kings 8:11-12). These texts typecast the enemy, especially those who act against the will of YHWH. But even texts like 2 Samuel 11-12 kill the innocent and unnamed Israelite child of king David; clearly the sin of David (likely a failure of leadership more than his incident with Bathsheba) is considered by the narrative to justify the death of the child. These texts only have impact because of the domestic and cultic value of children across the ancient world. The writers know their audience, and use children to build their rhetoric.

In these cases and others the common feature of children’s lives seems to be the social promotion of YHWHism, both in evokig children’s value and the rhetorical use of violence against them. Whether texts are protecting children or condemning them, children were an interpretive lynchpin for biblical texts.

Leaps forward can be made when changing from an adult-centric focus to one that concentrates on children. While we approach children from different angles, we both find that the ancient Near Eastern data illumine our understanding and show children played a more essential role in ancient cultures than suspected. Children had great value, to the deity and to society as a whole. Ironically, this was often in tension with the vulnerability children faced from the same individuals endowing them with value.

 

Kristine Henriksen Garroway is Visiting Assistant Professor of Hebrew Bible at the Hebrew Union College, Jack H. Skirball Campus in Los Angeles.

Shawn W. Flynn is Associate Professor of Hebrew Bible at St. Joseph’s College, University of Alberta, and the Academic Dean of the College.