Jephthah’s Daughter, Sarah’s Son: The Death of Children in Late Antiquity has been a slow-burning labor of love for several years now. This is a book about dearths and absences: that of children from families and communities in premodernity; that of evidence, both textual and material, for those families’ and communities’ responses to children’s deaths; and that of scholarship tracing the affective and ritual arcs of their commemoration in early Christian settings. It asks, in short, how did individuals and communities experience bereavement in a context in which as many as — or more than — 50% of children did not live to see their tenth birthday? And how were they taught to think and feel about these losses by Christian writers and preachers?
To begin to answer these questions, Jephthah’s Daughter, Sarah’s Son explores Christian expositions of some of the passages from the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament most frequently invoked to think about the death of children: the Death of Abel (Genesis 4); the Binding of Isaac (Genesis 22); the Killing of Jephthah’s Daughter (Judges 11); the bereavement of the Mother of Seven Sons (2 and 4 Maccabees); the destruction of Job’s Children (Job 1); and the peculiar martyrdom of the Holy Innocents (Matthew 2).
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