Children in Biblical Narrative and Childist Interpretation

Abstract

This chapter maintains that child characters have been long overlooked in biblical scholarship and calls attention to their critical roles in shaping the texts of the Hebrew Bible and New Testament. After a summarizing overview of recent scholarship, the chapter briefly discusses Hebrew and Greek terms that indicate children and youth. It proposes a new methodology, calledchildist interpretation, which offers tools for discovering the role and importance of young characters in biblical narratives. This six-step process then serves as a vehicle for analyzing the stories of Naaman’s slave girl (2 Kings 5:1–14) and Herodias’s daughter (Mark 16:7–29). By questioning traditional hegemonic interpretive assumptions from a fresh perspective, childist interpretation heralds an innovative and significant development in biblical narrative analysis.

Engaging studies of children in the Bible: What is going on and why you should care

“…Not surprisingly, much of the work of childist scholarship draws on tools of textual analysis, especially narrative criticism (see Gallagher Elkins & Parker, 2016). Philological study of terms used in the Bible to designate children (Eng, 2011, 58–94; Horn & Martens, 2009, 1–18; Parker, 2013, 41–76) discerned divisions of childhood marked by words that contain awareness of stages of development.…”

“…Early in its development, biblical studies adopted Wall's positive sense of ‘childist’, seeking to call attention to child characters (Parker, 2013, 16–18; see also 2019b, 135–139). Initially the term was applied to literary studies and defined as “interpretation that focuses on the agency and action of children and youth in the biblical text, instead of seeing them primarily as passive, victimized, or marginalized” (Gallagher Elkins & Parker, 2016, 425). Childist biblical studies now draws on a range of approaches (as above), and the term has been widely but not universally adopted (see Flynn, 2018b, 2–3).…”

Children in the Hebrew Bible: A field in growth

“…In particular, the past few years have seen a steady output of monographs on this topic (Bosworth, ; Flynn, , ; Garroway, ; Koepf‐Taylor, ; Parker, ) with likely more studies coming . This production has been fostered by a standing unit on Children and the Biblical World at the Society of Biblical Literature (since 2008), dictionary and encyclopedia defining this field (Elkins & Parker, ; Parker, ), some forthcoming collected volumes (Flynn, , ; Parker & Betsworth, ), and a very recent conference gathering these experts to discuss the current state of methods and approaches in the field: “Listening to and Learning From Children in the Biblical World, February 17–18, 2018, at Hebrew Union College in Los Angeles,” which this author attended and presented at. The results of this conference will be gathered into a forthcoming volume (Garroway & Martens, ).…”

“…There is thus a narrative and literary sensitivity to the approach clearly influenced by the early work of Fewell (). For some, “These methods form the basis for ‘childist’ interpretations of biblical texts, which examine the construction of child characters in the biblical world, and then reassesses their role and importance.” (Elkins & Parker, ). The steps of this method are also discussed in Parker () and have been developed in conference papers (Garroway, , ).…”

Children in the New Testament

“…Nevertheless, it was not until the latter half of the twentieth century that children themselves received sustained attention in New Testament studies; and even later that the study of children in biblical texts, the New Testament included, began to grow at an accelerated rate. Several recent review essays trace the field’s development with attention to this latter growth (Aasgaard 2006, 2019; Gallagher Elkins and Parker 2016; Lindeman Allen 2020c; see also Bunge, Fretheim, and Gaventa 2008: xiv-xxvi; Lindeman Allen 2019a: xiv-xix; Lim 2021: 8-26), linking increased attention to the characterization and metaphorization of children in the New Testament with parallel studies of children in the Hebrew Bible and, in particular, the recent emergence of childist criticism as a distinct methodological and perspectival approach (Gallagher Elkins 2013; Gallagher Elkins and Parker 2016; Betsworth and Parker 2019; Garroway and Martens 2019b; Garroway 2020; Parker 2023).…”