The Sacrifices of Isaac and Jephtah's Daughter, Monastery of Saint Antony on the Red Sea. Photograph by Patrick Godeau. Reproduced through the courtesy of the American Research Center in Egypt.
Jephtah's Daughter, Sarah's Son: Children, Death, and Scripture in Late Antiquity
Maria Doerfler (Visiting Research Scholar, ISAW)
NOTICE: Admission to the ISAW Lecture Hall closes 10 minutes after the scheduled start time
Childhood mortality rates in the pre-modern world were notoriously high: as many as half of all children did not live to see their tenth birthday. Yet, perhaps surprisingly, there is little explicit evidence of parental grief over such deaths: ancient burial grounds offer at best ambiguous evidence for children's commemoration, and letters and speeches directed at those who had suffered bereavement encourage stoic self-possession in the face of tragedy. Late ancient Christians differed little from their Jewish and Greco-Roman contemporaries in these regards; if anything, the focus on an all-knowing Deity intensified calls for parental equanimity in theological treatises. Beneath these elite conversations about childhood mortality, however, lurks a broader if quieter stratum of discourses surrounding families facing grief and loss. This lecture examines the treatment of biblical characters who had suffered (or expected to suffer) the death of a child in late ancient homilies and liturgical writings. By expounding, inventing, and valorizing parental bereavement in the patriarchs and prophets of the Hebrew Scriptures, late ancient writers could give voice to their and their audiences' experiences of loss, outrage, despair, and need for consolation in ways that shaped conversations about the death of children for centuries to come.
--Reception to follow
Maria E. Doerfler received her Ph.D. from Duke in 2013 and has since served as Assistant Professor of the History of Christianity at Duke Divinity School. A historian of exegesis, her research interests range from the Syriac East to the Latin West. Her particular focus lies with the deployment of texts and their interpretation in situations of personal or communal crisis. Her dissertation monograph, currently under review with a university press, seeks to address the interplay between philosophical, exegetical, and Roman legal discourses in monastic settings at the turn of the fifth century. Other recent publications include articles on the rhetorical construction of Judaism in Ambrose of Milan (Church History), North African approaches to ascetic exegesis (Journal of Early Christian Studies), Trinitarian developments in early Christian interpretations of Genesis 18 (Journal of Ecclesiastical History), and the death of children in Eastern Patristic literature (Le Muséon). During her time at ISAW, she will begin to lay the groundwork for her second book, a study of Christian responses to childhood and infant mortality in late antiquity. The monograph will orient itself around a set of commonly deployed passages from the Hebrew Scriptures and, to a lesser extent, the New Testament, by which Christians sought to lament, console the grieving, reason about death, and even indict God over the untimely passing of children.