Give Me Children or I Shall Die: Children and Communal Survival in Biblical Literature

Biblical Children, Biblical Childhoods

1 Biblical Children, Biblical Childhoods Humans live with the illusion that their attitudes toward their everyday lives are timeless. –—Patrick H. Hutton Introduction Biblical studies has increasingly come to understand itself as an interdisciplinary field. It engages the tools of archaeology, Assyriology, ideological and literary theories, philology, and a number of other areas of study so as to better access the biblical text. Each of these fields’s perspectives has left a mark on the academic study of the Hebrew Bible. This increasing disciplinary pluralism has made it clear that no method can claim scientific neutrality; each approaches interpretation from a particular point of view and set of assumptions. Neutrality is indeed impossible. Rather than pursue this impossible ideal, scholars can openly claim the perspective from which they write and recognize the benefits of the breadth of perspectives with which one may interpret the biblical text. Each is an opportunity to add an additional layer of insight. Each contributes an aspect of understanding without which our knowledge is incomplete. This book seeks to contribute yet another perspective to the growing breadth of exegetical voices. It presents a child-centered interpretation of several texts from the Hebrew Bible, pointing to the impact attention to children and childhood can have on contemporary readers’ understanding of the ancient context of this powerful cultural text. My goal in doing this is to reveal how attention to the particular understandings of childhood as essential aspects of ancient and modern life can help scholars avoid projecting anachronistic assumptions onto the ancient texts that are our focus. In my pursuit of child-centered sociohistorical hermeneutics, I engage the tools, questions, and perspectives offered by a growing interdisciplinary field 1 in which scholars across academic disciplines have begun participating in the past thirty to forty years: childhood studies.1 Across disciplinary boundaries, childhood studies seeks to draw academic attention to children and childhood, revealing new areas to be explored through academic research. It views children as full people with agency, rather than potential people in the making, and the concept of childhood as a cultural construction with a long and ever-changing history. The assertion that childhood is a social construction and the profound effect of this assertion on child-centered research is primary to the field of childhood studies. The understanding that childhood is socially constructed, along with the other tools and insights of childhood studies, provides significant interdisciplinary contributions to biblical studies. This book aims to explore the impact of these insights. I will begin by reviewing present publications and developments in childcentered interpretation of the Hebrew Bible so as to note the growth of the field and the necessity for continuing research, most particularly concerning the impact of ancient constructions of childhood in the Hebrew Bible and its interpretation. I will then characterize childhood studies, the interdisciplinary field I will be engaging throughout, and stipulate the significance of the understanding that childhood is a social construct. I will give a brief overview of the social history of childhood, with particular attention to the changing value of children and the increasing dominance of privileged Western constructions of childhood innocence. Having established the changing social value of children, I will consider the potential impact of this awareness on sociohistorical interpretation of the Hebrew Bible. To that end, I will review mortuary evidence that points to the boundaries ancient people may have placed around infancy, childhood, and adulthood. I will also examine comparative ethnographies of children’s labor in subsistence agricultural economies, as well as biblical texts that point to the economic value of children in the biblical world. Each of these elements points to the contrast between the dominant Western discourses around children and childhood and those that would have predominated in the world that produced the Hebrew Bible, suggesting that contemporary interpreters should look to ancient constructions of childhood to better understand the social and historical context of biblical texts. 1. Allison James and Alan Prout eds., preface to Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood: Contemporary Issues in the Sociological Study of Childhood, 2nd ed. (London: Falmer, 1997), ix. 2 | Give Me Children or I Shall Die Child-Centered Publications in Hebrew Bible Just as attention to the voices and presence of women, indigenous peoples, and a variety of marginalized groups in the Bible has contributed to biblical studies, so too can increased attention to children. Indeed, such work has already begun. Within the academic study...