People of the Book: Professor of Bible Kristine Garroway Examines Treatment of the Death of Children in Ancient Israel

In her forthcoming book The Dying Child: The Death and Personhood of Children in Ancient Israel (Oxford University Press, February 2025), Kristine Garroway, Ph.D. '09 continues her research on children in ancient Israel - this time turning her focus to mortality in texts and the archelogy of the period. The loss of a child, she says, is "painful. It's heartbreaking. And it's something that's relatable; it's a point of connection." And yet, in spite of that universality, Garroway found that the subject was underexplored in scholarship in the field and was in need of further examination - so she decided to deepen her previous research on death and the afterlife, and place it at the center of her new book. The Professor of Bible, who received her doctorate in Hebrew Bible and Cognate Studies from Hebrew Union College in 2009 and joined the faculty in 2011, is also the author of Children in the Ancient Near Eastern Household (2014) and Growing Up in Ancient Israel: Children in Material Culture and Biblical Texts (2018). Garroway joined us from her office at the Skirball Campus in Los Angeles ahead of the publication of her new book to talk about the project.

Much of your work has looked at what we can learn about children and infants in ancient Israel. What led you to decide that this project needed to focus on how they were treated in death?

Kristine Garroway: The theme of this book project is something that I kept coming back to over and over again. Looking back, I realized that, in my first book, I had worked on children and their place in different social institutions and their legal status, and then I had a whole chunk on death and the afterlife, which was disproportionate to the rest of the book. And then when I worked on my second book, going through the life cycle of a child, again there was this disproportionate chunk on children and death. That really made me think: hey, I wonder what's going on in the ancient world?

Your scholarship looks not only at ancient text but also the archeological record - you have participated in excavations in Israel at Ashkelon, Tel Dor, and Tel Dan over the course of your career. What is the relationship between archeology and text in your new project?

KG: This book looks at the archaeology first, where we can see how a society cares for the remains of children, and then asks what attitudes we see reflected in the textual materials of the time. This really shows you something about whether people understood that individual who had passed on to be a part of their community, or not a part of their community. And so the question I was really curious about in this project is, how were children perceived? In the afterlife, did they have personhood - that is to say, were they considered a part of the family in life, and part of that family household in death? Or, because they were so young, were they considered less a part of society, so that society treated them differently?

What are some ways to determine whether a deceased infant or child had what you describe as personhood in its social context?

KG: Personhood is a broad term, and it means different things depending on where you're geographically located and the society that you're in. In more traditional societies - and this also plays out in the ancient world - there is a notion that personhood is imbued in the things that touch one's body and can be given. So, if I were to knit a scarf for you and give it to you, I'm not just giving you this gift of a scarf; I would be giving you something that has my essence in it. For burial context, similar examples would be burial goods that people are buried with - items like jewelry or a burial shroud - personal adornment items, something that would have been made for them that would have been worn on the body. These things were all collected into a repository pit in Judean tombs, where they got mixed together with previous burial goods from other people. In addition to burial goods, skeletal remains were also collected into these pits. So it's as if the entire family is being mixed up and kept together in death, and their personhoods are all sort of sticking together, rather than being separated out. Most importantly, these repository pits include children.

When you embarked on this project, what was apparent in previous research on this topic - including your own - and what were the gaps in the scholarship that you identified?

KG: There has been a lot of scholarship on the Hebrew Bible and the archaeological record on adults, because adults are writing the texts, and most often adults are found buried - if there are burial remains. I wanted to step in and talk about the rest of society. We know there were children, so where were they? Some of our texts mention the death of children - for example, King David has an infant child that dies. But we don't know if there was any sort of funerary context, if there is a burial that happened, if it was buried with David's family. So there are lots of gaps in the biblical texts - and in archaeology. In earlier excavations, people often didn't consider that they would find children. Children's bones were sometimes mistaken for animal bones and would be thrown out, or they would get mixed around when robbers would come into tombs later looking for valuables. It's very easy to take things off of small bodies, but when you have a large skeletal body that you're working with, those remains aren't as easy to break up. Fair warning: a lot of this subject matter is gruesome.

How did you address those gaps with your own research?

KG: No one to my knowledge has gone through and systematically looked for remains of children in ancient Israel and in areas surrounding ancient Israel. I was specifically interested in ancient Judah, because that's where we think the Hebrew Bible was written and compiled. So I looked for skeletal remains of children in the northern Kingdom of Israel, to the northwest with the Phoenicians, down the Phoenician coast to the Philistine coast - the Negev area and somewhat in the Transjordan as well as in Judah - to ask if there were patterns or trends, or how children were buried, and if anything could be said about whether or not these children had personhood or were perceived to be people within their society. What became clear was that adults in Judah were burying their children differently than their neighbors, which suggests they had a different understanding of the afterlife and how their children fit into it.

One of the things you look at in your forthcoming book is the way Judahites buried their children in a completely different manner than their neighbors, by using rock-cut family tombs. What is the particular significance of those tombs?

KG: Since scholars of archaeology and biblical literature started studying these rock-cut tombs that are in ancient Judah, they called them family tombs. In some cases, there weren't even any skeletons in the tombs, but they just called them family tombs. And no one stopped to ask the obvious question: were they actually for entire families or for just adults? And so, to my knowledge, I'm the first one to really dig into that, and to I think systematically show that these were indeed family tombs for the eldest, all the way down to the very youngest members of the community.

How would you sum up your findings on what the archeological record and the texts tell us about how children and infants were viewed in that area at that time?

KG: My conclusions were twofold. First, I found that, by and large, all communities understood their children to have some form of personhood or be invested somehow in their community.

Second, I found that the community within ancient Judah buried their children in a completely different manner than all of the other surrounding regions, which I think means that they had a real desire to present their children as ethnically Judahite. Unlike their neighbors, who buried children by themselves, in pits, jars, cist tombs, and at times not even in cemeteries, but under house floors, Judahites did things differently. Instead, Judahites buried their children in family tombs. This is unique for the region and it shows - at least in my opinion - a real desire to, as the biblical text says, bury individuals with their kin. Broadly speaking, it demonstrates a continuity between those who comprise the household of the living and the household of the dead. In other words: family is family, even into the afterlife, even for children.

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