FOA Webinar: Kristine Garroway - American Society of Overseas Research (ASOR)

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FRIENDS OF ASOR WEBINARS

The Dying Child: Death and Personhood of Children in Ancient Israel

Friends of ASOR present the next webinar of the 2024-2025 season on April 16, 2025, at 7:00 pm EDT, presented by Dr. Kristine Garroway. This webinar will be free and open to the public. Registration through Zoom (with a valid email address) is required. This webinar will be recorded and all registrants will be sent a recording link in the days following the webinar.

The death of a child is perhaps the most painful, heartbreaking, and seemingly unnatural experience we have the displeasure of living with. Yet it is difficult to say with certainty whether this sentiment was shared by the inhabitants of ancient Isarel. Some anthropologists have found that in societies which experience a high rate of infant mortality and childhood death, parents remain emotionally detached from their children and do not mourn their deaths. We know that ancient Israel, like many pre-industrial societies, had a very high rate of infant mortality and childhood deaths. Did Israelites therefore care for their dying children? Did they give them a proper burial? Did they consider their children part of their families? The Hebrew Bible does not offer much information on the subject. Every time a child’s death is referenced, it is as a plot device in a narrative to prove an ethical, moral, or theological point. Abraham must sacrifice his child to show his commitment to God; Elijah shows off his wonder-working skills when he revives a dead child; David and Bathsheba’s first child dies because David committed murder and adultery; and Solomon demonstrates his wisdom when he commands a child to be cut in half. Yet, none of the biblical texts discuss how, or even if, Israelites cared for their dying children. Fortunately, there is another source to which we can turn to answer such questions: archaeology.

The archaeological record provides us with an incredible amount of information regarding the way that families coped with the death of a child. Yet, it has gone underappreciated, even unnoticed in the scholarly literature. This talk will take you along a journey to explore the ways in which people living in the time of the Israelite monarchy (Iron Age II ca. 1200-587 BCE) cared for their dying children. It will examine the different methods of burying children and the possible beliefs driving the choice of interment. We will discuss the relationship between a belief in rebirth and jar burials in the Northern Kingdom and cremations on the coast, as well as the Judahite concern for ethnically marking one’s child as Israelite and including them in the family tomb. While the array of burial practices attests to the heterodox beliefs of people living in the land of Israel, one thing unifies them: as we will see, people understood even young children to have some degree of personhood, which necessitated both burial and post-mortem care.

Kristine Henriksen Garroway is Professor of Bible at the HUC-JIR’s Skirball Campus in Los Angeles where she joined the faculty in 2011. She received her doctorate in Hebrew Bible and Cognate Studies at the HUC-JIR/Cincinnati in 2009. She has spent time studying and researching in Israel and has participated in excavations at Ashkelon, Tel Dor, and Tel Dan. Garroway’s scholarship focuses on children using archaeology and texts of ancient Israel and Mesopotamia. She has published in various scholarly journals and is a regular contributor to thetorah.com. Garroway’s books include: Children in the Ancient Near Eastern Household (Eisenbrauns 2014), Growing Up in Ancient Israel: Children in Material Culture and Biblical Texts (Society of Biblical Literature 2018), and The Dying Child: the Death and Personhood of Children in Ancient Israel (Oxford, 2025). She is the recipient of the Biblical Archaeological Society’s 2019 Publication Award for Best Book Relating to Hebrew Bible.