Hasil untuk "The Bible"

Jorunn Økland

Mark L. Strauss

Chester Warren Quimby

W. D. Reyburn

Anna Kernbach

Julie Faith Parker

Children pervade the Hebrew Bible and were an integral part of ancient societies, yet they were largely ignored in biblical scholarship until the twenty-first century. Academic interest in children and the broader field of childhood studies has expanded rapidly since the latter part of the twentieth century. This burgeoning interest was spurred in part by the publication of Philippe Ariès’s Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life (translated by Robert Baldick [New York: Random House, 1962]; original 1960 publication in French by Philippe Ariès, L’enfant et la vie familiale sous l’ancien régime), a seminal work that claimed that children were viewed as “mini-adults” until the Renaissance. While this theory has been largely debunked, some Bible scholars uncritically adopted this view. However, the Hebrew Bible has concepts of children as different from adults that are revealed by the various terms that designate children and youth in successive stages of life. Foundational studies examined this vocabulary to explore ancient Israelite concepts of children and childhood. A key insight was the recognition that modern, Western concepts of children and childhood are anachronistic, ethnocentric, and largely irrelevant when applied to ancient texts. Ideas that many take to be inherent attributes of children (e.g., that they are innocent, carefree, playful, or nonsexual) are instead specific cultural expectations that may bear little or no relation to children in the world of the biblical Israel. The study of children in the Hebrew Bible marks its genesis as an academic field in 2008 with the establishment of the Children in the Biblical World section of the Society of Biblical Literature. A wide range of methodologies now offer tools for exploring portrayals of children in biblical texts and in the cultures of the ancient Near East. Many scholars have adopted the term “childist” to designate interpretations focused on children, and the discipline has become established within biblical studies. Approaches to learning about children are often interdisciplinary, and works cited in one category could often fit also in another. The field is intentional about being collegial (scholars support each other), creative (encouraging different methodological approaches), and concerned (recognizing the implications of the work for living children).

John Fea