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  • Jephthah’s Daughter, Sarah’s Son: The Death of Children in Late Antiquity by Maria E. Doerfler
  • Oana Maria Cojocaru
Maria E. Doerfler
Jephthah’s Daughter, Sarah’s Son: The Death of Children in Late Antiquity
Oakland, CA: California University Press, 2020
Pp. 416. $ 29.95.

The book focuses on how late antique people responded to the challenging issue of childhood mortality which was part and parcel of the everyday life of Christian communities. Parents who asked themselves why their children suffered and died so young or how they were to cope with this tragic event may have found their answers in liturgical narratives composed by various Christian authors of the fourth to the sixth centuries, in both the Latin West and the Greek and Syriac East. The overarching argument of Doerfler is that these narratives, crafted around a few well-known biblical characters who experienced tragic losses themselves, were intended to provide psychological, moral, and theological support to bereaved parents.

After outlining in the Introduction the scope and structure of her study, in Chapter One Doerfler situates children’s deaths in their socio-historical and ritual contexts by discussing the burial practices and commemoration of departed children. Mindful of the meagerness of archaeological data concerning children’s funerary practices, the author skillfully combines material and textual evidence that give some insight into a range of practices surrounding the death, burial, and commemoration of children, which vary according to the geographical location, financial means, and family preferences.

Chapter Two focuses on the liturgical narratives inspired by Genesis 4, which records the killing of Abel by Cain, an occasion for exegetes to portray Eve and Adam as epitomes of parental bereavement, and to teach their audience how to grieve their own dead children. Eve is featured as particularly shaken by Cain’s fratricide: she has not only lost Abel, but also Cain who was punished to wander the world. Doerfler argues that Eve’s suffering envisioned especially by the Syriac writers acted as a mirror through which bereaved parents could internalize their [End Page 665] experience of losing their dear children. One consolation for their loss was the idea preached in the patristic literature, according to which, the departed children would enjoy their afterlife in paradise.

Chapter Three deals with the Akedah (Genesis 22)—another biblical story that inspired Christian exegetes to explore the theme of childhood mortality within the context of parental submission to the divine will and the sacrifice of children to God. Abraham’s composure when fulfilling the divine command to kill his own son provided the opportunity for late antique writers to envision various scenarios of what Sarah might have said or done when finding about her husband’s intention to sacrifice Isaac. She becomes “a compensatory figure” (96), “a vital voice for parental grief, lament, and recrimination in aspects of the late ancient exegetical tradition” (99).

Chapter Four deals with the intertextual connection of the Akedah with two other biblical narratives that present parents sacrificing their children: Jephthah’s killing of his only daughter (Judges 11), and the mother of the Maccabean martyrs (2 Maccabees 7). In stark contrast with Abraham, whose stoic attitude and readiness to fulfill God’s command to kill his own child was praised by various homilists and commentators, Jephthah aroused heavy criticism for his emotional display at the prospect of killing his own daughter. Against this adverse view of Jephthah’s manifestation of grief, Jacob of Serugh saw him as “a model of balancing grief with duty” (116), “a fundamental human—but not, for that reason, a less admirable—response to moral conflict and especially bereavement” (117). If Jephthah’s character diverges from the masculine ideal of how grief should be expressed, the Maccabean mother, who completes the triad of biblical parents who sacrificed their children, represents the manly woman who displays resilience in the face of her sons’ deaths, a role model for family relationships and spiritual formation of children, as well as “an exemplar of both old and ‘new’ motherhood, of triumphant stoicism, and deep parental attachment and suffering” (142).

Chapter Five examines how the story of Job was deployed by homilists and commentators for different strategic...

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