Those who have spent time within earshot of a crying baby know the stress this sound can induce. Considerable scientific research has been devoted to the causes and consequences of infant crying because it is a public health concern implicated in parental frustration and infant abuse. Infant Weeping seeks to draw on the extensive research on infant crying in order to understand better the motif of infant weeping in ancient literature. The present book contributes to the growing interest in correlating scientific and humanities scholarship. Scientific research can help bridge the cultural distance that separates modern readers from ancient texts. For example, the Akkadian incantations for soothing infants may appear to be strange magical texts from a foreign world (which they are), but they also reflect common human realities that have been part of the parent-infant relationship in all times and cultures. The incantations reflect and evoke emotions and responses familiar to anyone who has cared for a baby. Fuller understanding of the dynamics of the parent-child relationship can help us see commonalities across differences and make foreign texts more interesting and relevant. David Bosworth draws on the natural sciences to develop a theory for analyzing infant weeping in literature. He then analyzes ancient Akkadian magical incantations for soothing crying babies as well as portions of the Babylonian Creation and Flood stories; in the Hebrew Bible, he explores two infant abandonment stories (Genesis 21 and Exodus 2) and the many parallels between them that have been overlooked; finally he examines a select corpus of Greek infant abandonment stories, including stories found in Herodotus, Sophocles, and Diodorus, among other authors. He ultimately places these textual corpuses in comparison with one another.

Flynn contributes to the emerging field of childhood studies in the Hebrew Bible by isolating stages of a child's life, and through a comparative perspective, studies the place of children in the domestic cult and their relationship to the deity in that cult. The study gathers data relevant to different stages of a child's life from a plethora of Mesopotamian materials (prayers, myths, medical texts, rituals), and uses that data as an interpretive lens for Israelite texts about children at similar stages such as: pre-born children, the birth stage, breast feeding, adoption, slavery, children's death and burial rituals, childhood delinquency. This analysis presses the questions of value and violence, the importance of the domestic cult for expressing the child's value beyond economic value, and how children were valued in cultures with high infant mortality rates. From the earliest stages to the moments when children die, and to the children's responsibilities in the domestic cult later in life, this study demonstrates that a child is uniquely wrapped up in the domestic cult, and in particular, is connected with the deity. The domestic-cultic value of children forms the much broader understanding of children in the ancient world, through which other more problematic representations can be tested. Throughout the study, it becomes apparent that children's value in the domestic cult is an intentional catalyst for the social promotion of YHWHism.

The topic of children in the Bible has long been under-represented, but this has recently changed with the development of childhood studies in broader fields, and the work of several dedicated scholars. While many reading methods are employed in this emerging field, comparative work with children in the ancient world has been an important tool to understand the function of children in biblical texts. Children in the Bible and the Ancient World broadly introduces children in the ancient world, and specifically children in the Bible. It brings together an international group of experts who help readers understand how children are constructed in biblical literature across three broad areas: children in the Hebrew Bible and the Ancient Near East, children in Christian writings and the Greco-Roman world, and children and materiality. The diverse essays cover topics such as: vows in Ugarit and the Hebrew Bible, obstetric knowledge, infant abandonment, the role of marriage, Greek abandonment texts, ritual entry for children into Christian communities, education, sexual abuse, and the role of archeological figurines in children’s lives. The volume also includes expertise in biological anthropology to study the skeletal remains of ancient children, as well as how ancient texts illuminate Mary’s female maturity. The volume is written in an accessible style suitable for non-specialists, and it is equipped with a helpful resource bibliography that organizes select secondary sources from these essays into meaningful categories for further study. Children in the Bible and the Ancient World is a helpful introduction to any who study children and childhood in the ancient world. In addition, the volume will be of interest to experts who are engaged in historical approaches to biblical studies, while appreciating how the ancient world continues to illuminate select topics in biblical texts.

This ground-breaking volume examines the presentation and role of children in the ancient world, and specifically in ancient Jewish and Christian texts. With carefully commissioned chapters that follow chronological and canonical progression, a sequential reading of this book enables deeper appreciation of how understandings of children change over time. Divided into four sections, this handbook first offers an overview of key methodological approaches employed in the study of children in the biblical world, and the texts at hand. Three further sections examine crucial texts in which children or discussions of childhood are featured; presented along chronological lines, with sections on the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible, the Intertestamental Literature, and the New Testament and Early Christian Apocrypha. Relevant not only to biblical studies but also cross-disciplinary scholars interested in children in antiquity.

In Children and Methods: Listening To and Learning From Children in the Biblical World, Kristine Henriksen Garroway and John W. Martens bring together an interdisciplinary collection of essays addressing children in the Hebrew Bible, New Testament, and broader ancient world. While the study of children has been on the rise in a number of fields, the methodologies by which we listen to and learn from children in ancient Judaism and Christianity have not been critically examined. This collection of essays proposes that while the various lenses of established methods of higher criticism offer insight into the lives of children, by filtering these methods through the new field of Childist Criticism, children can be heard and seen in a new light.

A ground-breaking collection exploring the rich array of emotions in biblical literature An international team of Hebrew Bible and New Testament scholars offers incisive case studies of passions displayed by divine and human figures in the biblical texts ranging from joy, happiness, and trust to grief, hate, and disgust. Essays address how biblical characters' feelings affect their relationship with God, one another, and the world and how these feelings mix together, for good or ill, for flourishing or vexation. Deeply engaged with both ancient and modern contexts, including the burgeoning interdisciplinary study of emotion in the humanities and sciences, these essays break down the artificial divide between reason and passion, cognition and emotion, thought and feeling in biblical study. Features Case studies drawn from multiple genres across the Bible: narrative, prophets, poetry, wisdom, Gospels, and letters Helpful select bibliographies of interdisciplinary resources at the end of each essay Critical balance between theory and practice and between method and close textual analysis Distinctive ancient Hebrew and Greek uses of emotional terms and concepts compared with each other and with evolving understandings in Western culture

Life and Death: Social Perspectives on Biblical Bodies explores some of the social, material, and ideological dynamics shaping life and death in both the Hebrew Bible and ancient Israel and Judah. Analysing topics ranging from the bodily realities of gestation, subsistence, and death, and embodied performances of gender, power, and status, to the imagined realities of post-mortem and divine existence, the essays in this volume offer exciting new trajectories in our understanding of the ways in which embodiment played out in the societies in which the texts of the Hebrew Bible emerged.