Kristine Henriksen Garroway, Growing Up in Ancient Israel: Children in Material Culture and Biblical Texts. Atlanta: SBL Press, 2018.

One of the main challenges with discussing children in the Bible comes from the dearth of information available; the Bible does not often incorporate experiences of children and mothers. In order to offer a more wholistic view of the people of the ancient Near East (ANE), some scholars have adopted a childist approach, or an approach that privileges the perspective of the child. They ask questions like: “What is the relationship between the child, their world, and adults? What did it mean to be a child in the past? When do children become gendered? Can we talk of childhood in past societies?” (4).

Kristine Henriksen Garroway enters this conversation in her book, Growing Up in Ancient Israel: Children in Material Culture and Biblical Texts. However, rather than looking to “the intersection of gender, linguistics, and literary theory” in her reading of the Hebrew Bible, as most scholars implementing a childist approach do, Garroway turns to textual and archaeological sources from ancient Israel and its surrounding societies. That is, Garroway seeks to better understand children in the Bible by turning to children in ancient Israel. Garroway’s ultimate goal is to “highlight the muted children preserved therein and place them in their world” (12).” To do this, Garroway uses a comparative approach, drawing on the Bible, iconography, epigraphy, archeology, and ethnography. This comparative method offers more data to interpret children in the Bible than any single method on its own. The layout of the book begins with pre-birth, birth, and post-birth and concludes with the growing child and the death of children, which I explain in more detail in the next paragraph.

Garroway organizes her book around child development starting from conception and ending in older childhood. She begins in chapter one with pregnancy and the struggles with infertility that women (and men) experienced in ancient Israel. Because the biblical text does not spend much time discussing pregnancy, Garroway supplements her information with textual material from the ANE, her first foray into the comparative method. Most frequently, infertility was attributed to women, though there are a few acknowledgments of male infertility. However, because people in the ANE found male infertility so embarrassing, there are only hints of it in texts. Consequently, texts in the ANE and the Bible report instances of women attempting to cure their infertility through various remedies including spiritual, medical, and magicomedical means. Garroway also addresses textual evidence in the ANE and the Bible regarding pregnancy and birth; these texts come not from midwives, but from the “professional” class of doctors and exorcists. While pregnancy was typically desired, some women attempted to prevent pregnancy through abstinence, breastfeeding, or coitus interruptus. Though women sometimes engaged in birth control methods, texts in the ANE indicate that intentional abortions were not condoned. Though boys were preferred due to inheritance and labor, girls were still considered to be valuable; if a pregnancy test to determine the sex of the child revealed the mother was expecting a girl, they did not abort the fetus. Further, Mesopotamian texts indicate that people employed methods to prevent miscarriages. Harm to fetuses could come through human or divine intervention, and people attempted to protect from both.

Pregnancy carried with it many risks of losing the child, but birth, the subject of Garroway’s chapter two, was even more dangerous for the mother and child. Again, Garroway supplements the scant information in the biblical text through her comparative method, drawing on other ANE texts, iconography, and ethnography. In order to keep away demons and other forces that would bring harm to the mother or child, the stone birthing blocks, bricks, or stools served not only to aid in the birth, but also to protect from such forces. Even in spite of these efforts, many times women and infants died in childbirth. It was even more rare for women to carry twins to term and deliver them safely. If they did, identical twins were seen as doubles of one person, while fraternal twins were seen as two individual people; fraternal twins were preferred in ancient Israel as compared to identical twins. Garroway notes the lack of information about the birth process in ancient Israel, so she draws on both comparative ANE and ethnographic data. Part of the reason for this lack of information stems from the fact that men produced texts, and men were not allowed into the delivery room, creating a sort of mystery around birth in ancient Israel. However, the biblical text does provide some information about the birthing process through birth metaphors about war found in the Prophets. Once the child was born, ethnographic studies can provide some insight into what happened next. Women present at the birth would cut the cord, clean the infant with salt or oil and test the baby’s basic functions and reactions. Much of this post birth routine has not changed.

In chapter three, Garroway discusses newborn rituals and practices. One of the most important rituals in a newborn’s life was the naming ritual. Garroway highlights the importance of names; specifically, she argues that newborns were given names that appealed to praise and thanks; they also often addressed the newborn family’s social status or the child’s future. Along with naming, socializing the child into their appropriate gender often began shortly after birth. In Mesopotamian texts, for example, one such ritual involved placing gender specific items in the hands of the child. Apart from naming and gender, Garroway delves into the methods of feeding. Most newborns nursed at their mother’s breast, though some affluent families utilized wet nurses so that the mother could become pregnant more quickly. Some archeological evidence—cups with drinking spouts—points to the possibility that infrequently newborns might have been fed from sippy cups. Finally, Garroway looks again to artifacts in the ANE, namely rattles, that parents may have used to quiet their children. In this chapter, Garroway seeks to highlight the fact that parents in the ANE cared for their children the best way they could, in spite of the high mortality rates.

High child mortality rates began even before birth and continued for several years. In chapter four, Garroway examines ways parents, and particularly mothers, sought to protect their unborn children, newborns, and small children from the spirit world. These attacks could stem from demons like Lamaštu and Lilith, or they could be caused by humans casting the evil eye upon the child. Mothers would wear or hang protective talisman to ward off such magic attacks. Further, they might use drawings or talisman not to ward off demons, but rather to invoke a specific god’s protection. Some protective objects might solely be to protect the child, such as a guard dog figurine buried at the threshold of the house. Others might have a practical purpose as well, such as the birthing bricks Garroway addresses in chapter 1; the bricks practically helped women to birth children, but they also had images of deities on them to serve as protective spells.

Chapter five deals with the ways in which children learn how to behave in the world. Garroway states: “Successful gendering and enculturation is key to producing adults who can contribute to society and in turn reproduce society” (138). Rather than attending school, children learned skills from their parents: girls learned domestic tasks and the practice of household religion from their mothers, while boys learned tasks such as sheep shearing or watching animals from their fathers. In addition, society gendered boys by circumcising them.

While chapter 5 treats the gendered education of the child in ancient Israel, chapter six discusses the gendering of children through clothing. Garroway draws on her comparative method looking to the biblical text, iconography, and ethnographic data to analyze the clothing of children in Ancient Israel. In the biblical text, various young characters such as Samuel, Joseph, and Tamar wear special garments that highlight not only their youth, but also their status. Additionally, David’s clothing changes as he moves from child to man. Iconography allows Garroway to delve into pictorial evidence of what children wore. She notes that children’s garments differed by gender and also by different ages. While young girls might be portrayed as smaller versions of their mothers, young boys wore different garments than older boys and men. The ethnographic data Garroway draws from suggests that young children and infants are dressed similarly regardless of their gender; they do not wear pants, something found also in the iconographic data. Further, infants and young children might also have decorations sewn into their clothing meant to protect the children from spiritual harm.

In order to access the topic of play, the subject of chapter 7, Garroway utilizes what she calls an anthropological lens alongside a brief overview of play theory. The anthropological lens, where Garroway highlights the universal nature of play by explaining an aspect of life in a modern society in order to expand the knowledge of play among ancient Israelite children, allows her to draw distinctions between boys and girls at play. Play theory, or the theory that “pretend play” is a universal experience across cultures and times, allows her to determine what she can consider to be play. Girls typically played with dolls or engaged in symbolic play, while boys played with objects. Archeological data include various objects such as dice and game pieces, which shape our understanding of how play appeared in ancient Israel. However, these data do not offer much explanation into the ages of the people engaged in this play. Sometimes these objects had other uses such as divination, so scholars must determine if they were even meant for play. To determine whether or not objects are toys, archeologists examine where the objects are found and if they are damaged. Children often damage their toys or play with old, broken household objects.

In the final content chapter, Garroway addresses the worst-case scenario: when children died. Garroway looks to the textual record, archeology, and anthropology to examine not only the ways in which children died, but also the way people reacted to deaths of children. Typically, particularly in the Bible and other textual data from the ANE, people reacted more negatively to deaths of children caused by other humans than to death from natural causes such as illness. While parents tried to protect their children from death due to illness, it was also an accepted part of life. Consequently, many times adults did not form strong attachments to infants due to their high mortality rates. Only when they got older did parents bond with their children, a trend found in anthropological data as well.

Garroway does not claim that her book gives readers a clear picture of children in ancient Israel. Instead, she claims that this book is just an initial attempt; future scholars can take this approach further. She states: “After reading this book, scholars, students, and indeed any reader of the Hebrew Bible should no longer ask where the children are but rather what more we can learn about children” (276).

This work’s value lies in its comparative approach, drawing from different methods in order to create a fuller picture of children in the ANE, as well as its encyclopedic nature. By beginning with the biblical text and filling in the gaps with iconography, archeology, and anthropology, she takes a broad view of children in ancient Israel. Her approach allows her to give readers a fuller picture of what childhood in the ANE looked like than if she drew from the biblical text alone. Further, because she incorporates so many data into her book and does not make an argument per se, this work reads as almost encyclopedic in nature. While there are limitations to this work, such as her heavy reliance on ethnography and extensive use of the passive voice, Garroway acknowledges them and explains why she has utilized the method she did. Unquestionably, this book is a move forward in field that is burgeoning with new materials and methods. Garroway’s approach offers a coherent comparative approach for future scholarship.

Caralie Focht holds a Ph.D. in Hebrew Bible from Emory University. She currently teaches religion at Cranbrook Schools in Bloomfield Hills, MI. Her interests lie primarily in traumatic and queer approaches to the biblical text.