The World of the Child in the Hebrew Bible by Naomi Steinberg (review)

Steinberg’s book joins a growing body of literature on childhood in the Bible, marking the growing interest in childhoods in different Jewish contexts. Writing about childhood in the Bible is not an easy task. The diversity of biblical material, the inconsistency in the use of terms, and the lack of previous scholarship on this topic complicates the question the author asks at the beginning of the book: “What is the child in the Hebrew Bible?” To answer this question, the author takes a mixed approach, combining traditional biblical criticism with sociological approaches and literary and linguistic analysis.

The book opens with a rather lengthy introduction, which includes, in effect, the introduction and the first two chapters. Here the author draws on her personal experience working with children in various contexts and describes the historical approach to childhood. Her use of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and her frequent references—here and in the conclusions—clearly mark the desire to apply biblical examples to the present. The construction of this section of the book also defines the readership of the book, which seems to be targeted more towards policy makers than biblical scholars or historians of childhood.

Chapter 3 concentrates on the terminology used for children and adolescence in the Hebrew Bible. Steinberg follows here the work of many childhood historians who have attempted to understand and reconstruct the different terms used in past societies for children. Although Steinberg uses a closed, finite, and digitized text to compile statistics, like many scholars before her, Steinberg acknowledges that “lexical study alone is insufficient to clarify the understandings of the meaning of childhood in biblical Israel,” which requires a more detailed study of the many variants that determined the experience of childhood in biblical narratives. Unfortunately, the chapter lacks an analysis of the word “childhood” itself. Also missing is a discussion of the gendered terms for boy and girl, as the most eminent finding is the reference to girls as “betula” (virgin) as opposed to sexless references to male children.

Chapters 4 and 5 are dedicated to a sociological analysis of biblical household structures and life cycle. The author draws here mostly on the Pentateuch narrative and law, and somewhat on secondary sources. She points out that the experience of childhood in the Bible was not uniform, but rather depended much on family structure, the order of birth, and broader sociological and familial forms. While Steinberg, like other scholars, reaches the conclusion that childhood did, indeed, exist in the Hebrew Bible, she argues that biblical sources do not shed light on the division of childhood into stages. This conclusion adds to the blurred picture that emerges at the end of chapter 3, when the discussion regarding terminology yields no conclusive evidence.

The core of the book is chapters 6 through 8. Steinberg discusses here three stories that each serve as an example of one aspect of childhood in the Hebrew Bible. Chapter 6 examines the story of Isaac and Ishmael in Genesis and serves as a case study of the use of different terms for children: na’ar, yeled, and ben. The tale also manifested the extent to which the family structures, gender, and order of birth affected the experience of childhood.

Chapter 7 discusses the story of Samuel, which Steinberg argues is a story of abandonment that highlights the status of the child as property. While this fact is manifested in various biblical narratives and in biblical law itself, Steinberg only mentions some of the examples in passing. Although reading the story as a story of abandonment is legitimate from a literary perspective, the usage of the terminology of rights, so foreign to the biblical world, should have been avoided.

The last case study in chapter 8 moves from biblical narrative to biblical law with an analysis of Exodus 21:22–25 in the context of the life of the fetus and the question of...