Jephthah’s Daughter, Sarah’s Son

The Death of Children in Late Antiquity

Maria E. Doerfler

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780520304154
• eBook ISBN: 9780520972964
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: World History

Late antiquity was a perilous time for children, who were often the first victims of economic crisis, war, and disease. They had a one in three chance of dying before their first birthday, with as many as half dying before age ten. Christian writers accordingly sought to speak to the experience of bereavement and to provide cultural scripts for parents who had lost a child. These late ancient writers turned to characters like Eve and Sarah, Job and Jephthah as models for grieving and for confronting or submitting to the divine.
 
Jephthah's Daughter, Sarah’s Son traces the stories these writers crafted and the ways in which they shaped the lived experience of familial bereavement in ancient Christianity. A compelling social history that conveys the emotional lives of people in the late ancient world, Jephthah's Daughter, Sarah's Son is a powerful portrait of mourning that extends beyond antiquity to the present day.
 

1

Children’s Deaths in Late Antiquity in Ritual and Historical Perspective

After the pregnancy, they say that the newborn child is wrapped in swaddling clothes on the third [day], and that on the ninth [day] it becomes stronger and tolerates being touched; and on the 40th [day] it acquires the ability to laugh and it begins to recognise its mother.

And in [the body’s] decomposition, they say, nature rounds the turning post and observes precisely the same numbers again, and falls apart by the same [numbers] by which it came together. Indeed, after one has died, on the third day the body is altered completely and its appearance can no longer be recognised. On the ninth [day] everything dissolves in liquidity, although the heart is still preserved. And on the 40th [day], this too disintegrates along with the rest.

—John the Lydian, De mensibus

Quickly did You remove his life from the earth; and now I recall him to mind with a sense of security, in that I fear nothing for his childhood or youth, or for his whole self.

—Augustine, Confessions¹

The death of Adeodatus makes only a scant appearance in Augustine’s Confessions, the bishop’s quasi-autobiographical narrative of his own youth and adulthood leading up to his eventual embrace of Christianity.² Augustine had doted on the boy, his only son; when Adeodatus’s mother, Augustine’s long-term partner, departed for North Africa, Augustine kept the child with him, personally tended to his education, and in due course gave him, just sixteen years old at the time, a prominent role in one of the dialogues Augustine composed at Cassiciacum.³ Yet despite his father’s evident attachment and prodigious literary output, the cause of Adeodatus’s death, his burial and last rites, and the commemoration he had enjoyed after his passing do not figure in Augustine’s oeuvre, and thus remain beyond historians’ grasp.

The obscurity that attaches to what is for contemporary readers perhaps late antiquity’s most famous prematurely deceased youth signals the challenges of situating the deaths of children in their ritual and socio-historical context. To be sure, children are not alone in presenting historians with this dilemma. For much of the first millennium of the Common Era our understanding of the practices and liturgies surrounding the death even of Christian adults is, at best, sporadic: prior to the emergence of the first orders of burial at the beginning of the eighth century, the processes by which any deceased individual moved from life to death and from deathbed to burial to commemoration are surprisingly opaque. Hints about them appear in hagiographic writings, in homilies, and occasionally in other, prescriptive texts, including the acts of local councils, typically because the latter sought to prohibit a particular practice.⁴ Éric Rebillard has fruitfully compared the last rites and burials of two of the best-attested décédées of late antiquity: Macrina, the sister of Gregory of Nyssa, and Monnica, the mother of Augustine of Hippo.⁵ And yet even amidst the relatively fulsome depiction of their final earthly moments, it remains difficult to discern what ought to be attributed to their special status—in Macrina’s case, for example, her function as head of a women’s monastic community—, to regional differences, or simply to the personal preferences of the families and clergy involved.⁶

These uncertainties weigh more heavily for the burial and commemoration of children and subadults, not least since we lack equivalent accounts about the deaths of particularly influential children. Late ancient hagiographies frequently feature children of various ages, but contain few details of their burial and commemoration by their families. As a result, the evidence discussed below involves a bricolage of data arguably imputable to children from adult burial rites, mentions in textual sources of children’s liturgical commemoration, and evidence derived from material culture. Even the latter, however, is not as reliable a fount of historical insight as might be desirable, and this despite the commendable amount of excavation and publication of children’s graves and cemeteries that has emerged in recent decades. Material witnesses suggest, for example, that throughout late antiquity, certain young children could be buried in communal cemeteries alongside adult dead, while other, to modern eyes indistinguishable infants in the same communities were buried in workshops or houses.⁷ What motivated these parallel practices remains a matter of contestation: we know that, without knowing why, and as such are constrained in drawing conclusions about their meaning.

These concededly ample caveats notwithstanding, we are not without resources for envisioning the days leading up to and weeks immediately after the death of children in late antiquity. The following pages provide a glimpse of the framework in which the literary, liturgical, and rhetorical witnesses discussed in subsequent chapters unfolded. As such, many aspects of the narrative call ahead to fuller discussion in later parts of the book.

FROM SICKBED TO BURIAL

Given the precarious nature of children’s lives in late antiquity, many families were not prepared to leave an offspring’s health to chance. Nor did aid in cases of illness necessarily come from physicians and midwives. As Maureen Carroll has noted, “No doubt medical care would be sought if a child fell ill, but it was not always available, nor was it necessarily on time or of any use.”⁸ Instead, parents who feared for their children’s well-being might turn to protecting them with charms, amulets, and spells. These measures were evidently in common use among many late ancient Christians: the remnants of incantations, prayers, and protective symbols crafted in papyrus, fabric, and other, more durable materials suggest as much, as do the pervasive and virulent arguments bishops leveled against these items.

Despite ecclesiastical critiques, many parents who sought to shield their children in this way doubtless saw themselves as wholly pious: after all, clergy themselves were apparently at times involved in preparing protective charms, and the language many of them invoke is replete with biblical invocations.⁹ A fifth-century-C.E. amulet from Oxyrhynchus demonstrates both the anxiety that may have moved a parent to seeking additional protection for her child, and the profoundly Christian tone such writings could take. The piece of papyrus, designed to be folded and worn on a string around the neck of its recipient, reads in part as follows:

Lord † Christ, son and word of the living God, the one who healed every disease and every sickness, heal and look upon your female slave Joannia also, to whom Anastasia alias Euphemia gave birth, and expel from her and put to flight every fever-heat and every kind of chill, quotidian, tertian and quartan and every evil, on account of the prayers and entreaties of our mistress, the God-bearer, and of the glorious archangels and of John, the holy and glorious apostle and evangelist and theologian, and of saint Serenus and of saint Philoxenus and of saint Victor and of saint Justus and of all the saints.¹⁰

Amulets often sought to provide wholesale protection from illness or envious demons.¹¹ In this instance, however, the entreaties suggest, as AnneMarie Luijendijk has pointed out, that Joannia received hers when she was already afflicted with the illness the amulet was intended to counter.¹² The text does not indicate whether Joannia was a child or an adult, nor does it tell readers about the extent to which her mother, Anastasia/Euphemia, was responsible for procuring the item. Yet ample examples point to both the desire to protect children by way of such charms and ecclesiastical concerns over the deployment of “magic” to these ends.¹³ John Chrysostom, writing in Antioch shortly before the production of the aforementioned amulet, for example, suggests that the sight of children with amulets or miniaturized gospel books around their necks was common in his city. Such practices might, the reader infers from Chrysostom’s complaints, indeed serve their purpose and provide protection for their wearers; in the bishop’s view, however, and that of many of his episcopal contemporaries, they seriously compromised the recipient’s hope for salvation. It was far better, Chrysostom argued, for a child to die than to survive by means of charms and enchantments.¹⁴

Whether or not a parent heeded such dire warnings or sought out protective measures for their offspring, the high incidence of childhood mortality ensured that most parents witnessed the death of one or more of their children at some point. In these situations, sources suggest, the moments leading up to a loved one’s passing were precious. In the following days and weeks, what was said and done at the time of death could be brought to mind again by grieving family members and could provide a source of solace. Late ancient sources describe tender scenes between parents and children, as in the case of an anonymous Greek homilist:

When ordinary parents have a son who is about to breathe his last breath, they sit around him, they listen to his last words, they embrace his hands, they join the promises about the unexpected, they kiss his mouth, the last kisses of the parents. Once the child has given up the ghost, at the command of Him who has given it, the parents put him in a certain position, they stretch out his hands, they close his eyes, they set his head right, they stretch out his feet, they wash him, they clothe him with worthy winding-sheets.¹⁵

In this process of performing these emotional and liturgical labors for a child, parents could “soften their own misfortune.”¹⁶ When families were deprived of the opportunity to spend these final moments with a child, writers suggest, deaths were experienced as particularly grievous.

Similarly painful was the absence of physical tokens by which parents could recollect the departed loved one. A Syriac homilist thus ascribes a rousing lament to a mother, the biblical matriarch Sarah, who here expects the nature of her son’s death to rob her of both final communion with and lasting mementos of his person:

I wish I were an eagle or had the speed of a turtle-dove,

so that I might go and behold that place, where my only child, my beloved, was sacrificed!

That I might see the place of his ashes, and look on the place of his binding,

and bring back a little of his blood to be comforted by its smell.

[That] I had some of his hair to place somewhere inside my clothes,

and when grief overcame me, I had some of his clothes,

so that I might imagine him, as I put them in front of my eyes;

and when suffering sorrow overcame me I gained relief through gazing upon them

I wish I could see his pyre and the place where his bones were burnt

and could bring a little of his ashes and gaze on them always, and be comforted.¹⁷

The desire for physical reminders of a departed loved one, particularly a child, were limited neither to Christian discourse nor to the homiletical imagination. Indeed, at times those who were remembered thus were not even the commemorator’s offspring. The emperor Augustus, for example, according to Suetonius, kept in his chambers a statue depicting one of the general Germanicus’s dead sons. This statue, its image taken perhaps from the boy’s death mask, Augustus “used to kiss . . . fondly whenever he entered the room.”¹⁸ In other...

Table of contents

• Imprint
• Subvention
• Title
• Copyright
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• (Premature) Death as a Good: An Introduction
• 1. Children’s Deaths in Late Antiquity in Ritual and Historical Perspective
• 2. East of Eden: The First Bereaved Parents
• 3. Mourning Sarah’s Son: Genesis 22 and the Death of Children
• 4. Echoes of the Akedah: Jephthah’s Daughter and the Maccabeans’ Mother
• 5. Death, Demons, and Disaster: Job’s Children
• 6. Children and the Sword: The Holy Innocents and the Death of Children
• Conclusion: Children in the Quicksand
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index