Jephthah’s Daughter, Sarah’s Son: The Death of Children in Late Antiquity by Maria E. Doerfler (review)

• Autores: Oana Maria Cojocaru
• Localización: Journal of early Christian studies: Journal of the North American Patristic Society, ISSN 1067-6341, Nº. 4, 2020, págs. 665-667
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • 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. 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). Infants’ deaths at the hand of Herod became an integral part of Christian teaching about suffering in this life and reward in the afterlife. Besides providing reassurance to late antique parents that their departed children enjoyed a paradisiac afterlife, these narratives, Doerfler argues, “served to give voice to parental grief and to valorize the experience of loss in the midst of exhortation to celebrate rather than mourn children’s passing” (198).