Children, pledging of

Abstract

Family strategies and the need for cash in an economy based on self‐sufficiency led to the pledging of freeborn children becoming a common phenomenon in Greco‐Roman world, both for boys and girls. Parents would pledge children, with their labor and services as further security, for the repayment for debts. Often the pledged child worked in the household of the creditor for the capital and/or interest of the debt, and thus the phenomenon was linked to child work and, more particularly, to the selling of children and the leasing of their work.

Children in the New Testament

“…Several recent annotated bibliographies, both spanning the whole biblical corpus (Aasgaard 2018; Lindeman Allen 2020c) and specific to the New Testament and its environs (Lindemann 2011; Vuolanto 2015; Aasgaard 2021; Lindeman Allen 2021a, 2021b) seek to address this diffusion of scholarship. Unfortunately, such work has frequently fallen short, especially with attention to research written in languages other than English and originating from scholars of the global South.…”