It is with great excitement that I present this volume. There has been some amazing work on the topic of children in the Bible and the ancient world. To understand children’s lives more effectively, comparative methods, and specifically historical and material approaches, have much to offer. In response to a developing and emerging field where methods are in flux, this volume gathers an international and diverse group of scholars already fostering this new area of research, but who share a broadly common approach rooted in a historical focus. For the first time, scholars who focus on a common method explore how historically informed reading methods contribute to understanding ancient children, and the biblical texts that employ them.
The contributors in this volume cover the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament in their respective comparative contexts, with other areas of expertise to supplement the discussion. Contributors are from Belgium, Germany, the USA, and Canada. They have been selected both for their common method, breadth of international coverage, and because they have already contributed monograph-length studies on the topic under examination for Cambridge University Press, Eisenbrauns, Oxford University Press, Brill, de Gruyter, etc. This volume now places their contributions in conversation across the various texts they study, thus highlighting similarities in their shared method(s). I need not summarize each of the contributions here, as these colleagues have already offered an abstract at the start of their essays.
To address the challenges of disunity that often comes with edited collections, I have introduced a few structural elements to give the volume coherence while maintaining its breadth. First, contributors have been carefully selected due to the tendency in their reading methods and their sympathy for the questions of history. Most essays demonstrate that the historical contexts are essential to understanding children. Second, contributors were invited into one of three broad categories before beginning their work for this project: children in the Hebrew Bible and the Ancient Near East, children in Christian writings and the Greco-Roman world, children and materiality. Therefore, areas of study that tend to be separate, Hebrew Bible versus New Testament for example, are gathered into one study and linked by a common method. Third, contributors have been encouraged to write to their specialty, but in such a way that an expert in another similar area can follow their argument. Fourth, most of those selected have already been working together in this area for some time, and are in most cases familiar with each other’s work.
Children in the Bible and the Ancient World - Comparative and Historical Methods in Reading Ancient Children
Edited by Shawn W. Flynn. – London: Routledge, 2019. – 241 p.
ISBN: 978-1-138-54376-8 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-351-00610-1 (ebk)
Children in the Bible and the Ancient World – Contents
List of contributors
Foreword
Abbreviations
PART I Children in the Hebrew Bible and the Ancient Near East
- 1 Vows and children in the Hebrew Bible HEATH D. DEWRELL
- 2 Turning birth into theology: Traces of ancient obstetric knowledge within narratives of difficult childbirth in the Hebrew Bible CLAUDIA D. BERGMANN
- 3 Uncooperative breeders: Parental investment and infant abandonment in Hebrew and Greek narrative DAVID A. BOSWORTH
- 4 Failure to marry: Girling gone wrong KRISTINE HENRIKSEN GARROWAY
PART II Children in Christian writings and the Greco- Roman world
- 5 Girls and goddesses: The Gospel of Mark and the Eleusinian Mysteries SHARON BETSWORTH
- 6 Children and the Church: The ritual entry of children into Pauline churches JOHN W. MARTENS
- 7 ‘Stay away from my children!’: Educators and the accusation of sexual abuse in Roman Antiquity CHRISTIAN LAES
PART III Children and material culture
- 8 I bless you by YHWH of Samaria and his Barbie: A case for understanding Judean pillar figurines as children’s toys JULIE FAITH PARKER
- 9 Coming of age at St Stephen’s: Bioarcheology of children at a Byzantine Jerusalem monastery (fifth to seventh centuries CE) SUSAN GUISE SHERIDAN
Afterword
- 10 Protoevangelium of James, menstruating Mary, and twenty-first-century adolescence: Purity, liminality, and the sexual female DORIS M. KIESER
Bibliography
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