We know little about children in the lands of ancient Israel. They did not leave behind their own diaries and the main text we have from that area, the Hebrew Bible, is concerned with more theological issues, not the mundane occurrences in a child’s daily life. However, if we look at what is left behind, namely, the mortuary record, we can begin to uncover the way children fit into ancient Israelite society. The intersection of personhood and the archaeology of a child’s death presented here provides a new picture of what dying meant and how the cult of the dead kin was understood in Iron Age Israel, specifically Iron Age II Judah.
See also The Dying Child: The Death and Personhood of Children in Ancient Israel (Oxford University Press, 2025).
By Kristine Garroway
Professor of Bible
Hebrew Union College
October 2025
Introduction
“You want to know what people really think about you? Wait until you’re gone, then the truth will come out.” I heard this once in a college psychology class. Of course, the professor meant to shock the room, but the sentiment is far from exaggerated. As mortuary archaeologists are quick to point out, it is the living that bury the dead (Pearson 2000, Härke 1994). Therefore, what we see in burials is an intentional presentation of the deceased by those in society who are participating in the burial ritual. How much more so for infants and children who were not old enough to issue any funerary directives.
The death of children is not a cheery topic, nor does it make for a good dinner conversation. Discussing the ins and outs of how a child died, how old they were, where they were buried, how they were buried, and the like, is, to be honest, rather morbid. Yet sometimes the toughest things to grapple with can provide deep insight into human nature, reveal keen insights about a culture, and allow us to learn more about what makes society tick.
Childhood Life Expectancy
Population studies of the ancient world estimate that up to fifty percent of infants died in the first year of life, and after that, another fifty percent would die before they reached fifteen years of age (Smith and Avishai 2005). These statistics do not consider the fetuses lost to miscarriage, preterm stillborns, or other such complications that cause a pregnancy to terminate pre-term (Meyers 2013: 99). Demographic studies of ethnographic societies like ancient Israel suggest that nuclear families were comprised of parents plus two to three children. As Meyers notes, “women [in ancient Israel] had to have multiple pregnancies, as many as eight, to reach optimal family size” (Meyers 2013: 110). Putting all this together, a woman would have spent most of her fertile years pregnant or trying to become pregnant in order to successfully raise two to three children to adulthood (Ebeling 2010: 101; Meyers 2013: 99).
Given these statistics, we would expect the textual and burial records of ancient Israel to address the topic of dying children. While the biblical text references a few children who die (e.g., 2 Samuel 12:16–23; 1 Kings 17:17–24; 2 Kings 2:23–24; 4:18–37), both the children and their deaths are plot devices used to further the story of the adults or to make a theological point. We hear nothing of their burials, what kind of afterlives they may have had, or how the adults processed their deaths. Indeed, King David shows emotion before his infant son dies, not after! We are told nothing about where the body of the royal son was laid to rest. Fortunately, the archaeological record provides more information regarding what ancient Israelites thought about the death of children and how they processed such an event. As we will see, children were valued, they had a degree of personhood, and their lives and place within the Israelite household did not end at death.
The Judahite “Family” Bench Tomb
Much has been written on Iron Age II (ca. 980–587 BCE) rock-cut bench tombs and on death and afterlife in the Hebrew Bible and ancient Israel (for an overview see Bloch-Smith 1992, Hays 2011, Stavrakopoulou 2010, Suriano 2018, Garroway 2025b). These tombs were given their name because of their location and characteristic benches or niches that line the walls. By the 7th–6th centuries BCE, bench tombs regularly included repository pits. As a caveat, while rock-cut tombs or caves with secondary burial pits and benches/niches have become synonymous with Judahite burials, such burials also appear outside of Judah, albeit with less frequency (Gonen 1992, Yezerski 2013). Moreover, these regions outside Judah include multiple styles of interment, while bench tombs remain the main style of burial within Iron Age II Judah.
Judahite bench tombs are often referred to as Judahite family bench tombs. If they were truly family tombs, then one would expect to find not just adult kin, but kin of all ages within the tomb. Because of their ubiquity and uniformity across Judah, the literature often applies this nomenclature to tombs based primarily on their architecture. As Suriano (2018) and Faust and Bunimovitz (2003, 2008) have pointed out, they appear to mirror the layout of the so-called Israelite four-room house. One would then assume that the constellation of people who populated the households of the dead would be like those populating the household of the living, i.e. both the four-room house and bench tomb would be used by a multi-generational family. Yet sometimes they are called family tombs and there are no skeletal remains found in the tomb! For example, the excavation report of Gibeon calls the burial there a family tomb, yet there are no bones; the “family” aspect is assumed because there are benches and a repository pit (Eshel 1987). In fact, most of the reports on Judahite bench-tombs list no skeletal remains. Reasons for this vary. For example, tombs were opened and looted in antiquity, and skeletal remains were broken, pushed about, or subsequently removed by animals. Even if a tomb was found intact, this did not automatically mean that excavators recorded all the skeletal remains. Oftentimes, children are simply missing from reports. A generous reading of the data might attribute the lack of immature remains to their very nature; they are especially prone to breakage and disintegrate easily. A less generous reading acknowledges that there were many times when excavators only paid attention to bones of adults, thereby passing over the remains of younger individuals or misidentifying them as animal bones (Lewis 2011: 3–4; Wicker 1998; Guy, Masset, and Baud 1997).
Happily, there are some reports where we see that they either were looking for children or were at least careful enough to list all remains found. In a study of Iron Age II Judahite sites, I found nine sites with some meaningful skeletal remains (Garroway 2025a: 85–89), by which I mean remains that received more than a passing reference to “scattered skeletal remains” in the reports. Because the pattern of remains was so similar between the sites, they can be understood as representative of how we might think about the way Judahites buried their dead.
In most cases, Judahite bench-tombs with skeletal remains do indeed include infants and children, as well as adults, supporting the conclusion that the term “family tomb” is an apt description. Note that even sites with few remains often included immature skeletal remains alongside adult remains. For example, the tomb complex at Tel ‘Eton, while relatively large, did not preserve many individuals: five females, one male, and one immature individual. The description of Tomb C1 ran as follows: “In view of the small number of individuals identified and their poor state of preservation the sex and age distribution of the remains in Tomb C1 are obviously not random and cannot represent the [entirety of the] population of the living at the time” (Arensburg and Belfer-Cohen 1992: 45). What remains understated is that the people who were found represent adult males and females, along with a child. While it is difficult to know the exact relationship between the individuals, it seems unlikely that a child or infant would be buried in a tomb alongside people they were totally unrelated to.
When compared to the way that infants and children are buried outside of Judah, the use of family tombs is noticeable. Outside of Judah, infants and children are buried using methods that are different from the adults of their communities. Consider data from the area associated with the Northern Kingdom of Israel. During the Iron Age II period, there was some continued use of earlier cave tombs and hewn tombs, but the family tomb style does not seem to be preferred in the same way it was in the South. True, bench tombs are found in and around modern-day Nazareth and possibly at Samaria, but sites like Megiddo, Zeror, Dothan, Tel Dan North, and Kinneret attest to the fact that extramural cemeteries, where people are buried individually, were fast becoming the favored method of inhumation (Baker 2012). While some children are found in cemeteries at these sites, children and infants are also found buried within the sites (e.g., Dothan and Megiddo). Furthermore, within cemeteries at these northern sites, the burials of infants and children do not appear to be in what we might call intergenerational family plots.
Consider also the coastal sites, whose cemeteries include a variety of burial styles: caves, pits, cists, jars, and stone-lined graves. In general, individuals in a given coastal cemetery are buried in a uniform manner. However, when we see a mix of burial styles, it is almost always a child or infant that is the outlier. For example, at Achzib, most infants and children are afforded burials like other members of their society. Yet, a few infant jar burials make an appearance, but they are not found under house floors or in a domestic space such as they were during the Middle Bronze Age period. Instead, the infant jar burials are placed within family burial caves, signaling both an intention to deposit the burial with the family, while at the same time differentiating the child (Mazar 1996). This mix of age differentiated burial styles can be seen inter alia at Azor, Tell er-Reqeish, Ashkelon, and Tell el-Far’ah South.
The preference for, and prevalence of, burials with adults, infants, and children placed together, in rock-cut, “family” bench tombs is unique to Judah during the Iron Age II. Of course, these lovely rock-cut tombs are likely the final resting place of people with means. It remains to be seen whether less affluent Judahite families also made a conscientious effort to bury families together. Without evidence from poorer tombs or burial sites in Judah, any conclusions are only speculative.
The Importance of Marking Children as Judahite
In my own work, I have suggested that the Judahite adoption of a particular style of tomb, which looked like a house, is related to social memory and memory making (Garroway 2025a). (The Hebrew Bible also hints at this by using the word בת [house] when קבר [grave] is meant: Isaiah 14:18; 1 Samuel 25:1; Qoheleth 12:5; and Psalm 49:12.) The common tomb becomes a place to be visited and revisited, drawing connections between the living and the dead and (re)constructing social identities. And here I am indebted to Melissa Cradic’s work on the Middle Bronze Age tombs at Megiddo (2017, 2018). Given the political turmoil of the Iron Age II (as witnessed by various wars) and competing ideologies Judah faced (as expressed in the Hebrew Bible), I posit that the Judahite family bench-tomb, opened and reopened, visited and revisited, as different family members died, could function as a means of confirming and reconfirming Judahite ethnic identity. As such, the tomb could function as a means of continuity and stabilization during times of turmoil and change. As Kerry Sonia has pointed out: “Both the family and the state are in a constant process of making and unmaking themselves, always losing and gaining new members” (Sonia 2020: 207). With respect to infants and children, burial in the family tomb may have been a way of stabilizing loss by marking the dying children as Judahite and including them in the collective household of death.
The Intersection of Ethnicity and Personhood
To make the argument that Judahites were interested in marking infants and children as Judahite by using family bench tombs requires thinking about the intersection of personhood and ethnicity. Personhood, broadly defined, is the state of being a person. What constitutes a person is culturally and socially constructed. Personhood as constructed in ancient societies is different from the way it is understood in contemporary western cultures. In the West, personhood is synonymous with individuality and indivisibility; personhood is fixed, and personal identity is more important than relational identities (Boutin 2011, Fowler 2004, Gillespie 2011). Catchy phrases like “be your own person” or “there is no one like you” or even “stand up for yourself” are witness to the way personhood is constructed in the West. Personhood in the West is also confined to a physical body, meaning that one’s personhood is one’s own – you cannot give it away. However, there are other ways in which to understand personhood. Kin-based societies, such as those found in the ancient Near East, stress the collective over the individual. We see this, for example, in the societal construction of the bet av (Steinberg 1993: 18–19; Fowler 2004: 48–52). These societies stress relational aspects of personhood. There, personhood is not individual but rather, dividual; it is not singular but plural. Furthermore, within dividual personhood, one can experience a partible personhood. This type of personhood involves the transfer of part of one’s own personhood to another to whom it is owed.
It is the notion of partible personhood that is most intriguing when it comes to thinking about Judahite family bench tombs and mortuary rites associated with them. What exactly mortuary rites might entail for Iron Age II Judahites has been the topic of many studies. (See the history of scholarship in Hays 2011.) Certainly, their Canaanite predecessors engaged in a cult of the dead, and while the biblical text protests against such a cult, it is impossible to ignore all of the references suggesting it existed (Suriano 2018, Hays 2011, Lewis 1989, Smith and Bloch-Smith 1988). The cult, construed broadly, involved caring for dead kin (Sonia 2020, Schmitt 2012). Part of this care was a proper or good burial (Olyan 2004). If the cemeteries surveyed are representative of the Judahite bench-tomb practice in general, then we see that those communities who buried in bench-tombs made sure to provide their infants and children with good burials. A good burial included not only interment in the family tomb, but deposition with grave goods. As will become apparent, it is with grave goods that the concept of partible personhood becomes significant.
Grave goods were placed with intention around a primary burial, and through the materiality of the object, a chain of events takes place (Mandell and Smoak 2019, Casella and Croucher 2011). First, the individual placing the grave good imparts some of their personhood onto the object. Again, the concepts of divisibility and partible personhood are important. Note that with partibility, “Parts of oneself originate in and belong to others. These can be identified as objects and extracted” (Fowler 2004: 5). In the current context the objects are grave goods, gifts that were left by the living for the dead. This leads to the second point, that grave goods are in relationship with the dying body. Third, regardless of when the grave good ceased to function, the relationship of the dying body with the grave good means that the dying body then imparts some of its own personhood onto the object.
In many of the excavation reports on Judahite bench tombs, it is difficult to determine with any certainty what grave goods were associated with which individuals. Instead of saying “there is nothing to be learned here,” I thought about looking at the data differently. Rather than looking for a one-to-one association of grave good to person, what if we were to focus on the places where things were intermingled? The most obvious places to examine were repository pits and tomb floors. Regarding intermingled skeletal remains, I discovered that at each of the sites where bones were found in repository pits, the skeletal remains of children were intermingled with those of adults. The same picture appeared on tomb floors, where the bones of children were found mixed with adults. I found it interesting that at Mt. Zion, when primary burials were removed, the remains were placed in two piles of long bones and skulls respectively. Notably, “all the material was mixed up without anatomical connection between the bones” (Arensburg and Rak 1985: 30). This signifies that the bones of children were not excluded from the piles, nor were they separated from the adult bones; they were treated in the same manner. Given that personhood is partible and permeable, this means that when the skeletal remains and or grave goods are moved into a secondary burial space and intermingled with older burials, many personhoods become intermingled. This is not to say things become a meaningless, complicated mess. To the contrary, the intermingling of the personhoods imparted on individuals and objects both past and present created new bonds, thereby reinforcing social memory and kinship bonds.
The same picture appears when examining situations where grave goods were intermingled with skeletal remains. Through the lens of partible personhood those items found in repository pits or placed in a heap gain new meaning. Sometimes the process of time caused the bones and goods to form an amalgam of items stuck together. When this happens, especially with bones, excavation reports will say the bones were “undefinable,” seemingly dismissing the remains as having any lasting significance, or as beyond the bounds of analysis. But ironically, time and climate conditions have perhaps done what societies intended all along, collected the remains together, incorporating the individual into the group. The individual has literally been “gathered to the ancestors” so much so that it is impossible to distinguish one from another. Most importantly, within Judean bench-tombs, infants and children alike were intentionally brought into this collective.
Based on this analysis, the intentional mixing of infants, children, adults, and grave goods takes on special meaning. The living members of a society actively chose not only to include their infants and children in bench tombs, but also to collect their remains and intermingle them with adults and adult grave goods. To this point, consider the repository pit at Ketef Hinnom, where over ninety-five individuals of all ages were found along with over one thousand objects (Barkay 1994: 96; Nagar 2015: 55–58). Rather than excluding infants and children, or placing them in a slightly different area, communities, like those burying at Ketef Hinnom, fully incorporated them into the household of the dead.
Navigating a New Relationship: Children in the Cult of Ancestors/Cult of the Dead Kin?
How did children and infants fit within the household of the dead? Did the living consider them as a part of cult of the ancestors? Such a cult would have involved the veneration of said ancestor. Scholars disagree on how this cult functioned (e.g., Schmidt 1996, Tropper 1989). Who could become an ancestor and their role within the larger household of the living and dead is a question that scholars often dance around. But the very notion of “ancestor” infers that this individual was a named dead person with living kin and descendants. To be an ancestor, one must have a biological child or adopted child; those who die childless are not candidates for ancestorhood (Teinz 2012: 239–42). Note that in societies where only dominate males can achieve full personhood, it is only the dominant male, the paterfamilias, who could become an ancestor (Lemos 2017). As members of the natal or extended family, other adults or children could be buried with the paterfamilias. Taking this to the logical conclusion, children and infants would not fulfill the requirements needed to be an ancestor. However, they do fit within the larger cult of the dead kin, and it appears they are cared for in the same manner as other members of their community, as witnessed by their association with grave goods. Just as feeding or caring for the defunct soul was important for adults (Suriano 2018, Sonia 2020), so too was it for children and infants.
Conclusion
To further our current understanding of ancient Israelites and their beliefs about death, it is imperative that children are included in the conversation. By exploring the physical architecture, the use of space, and the materials present within, we see that Judahite bench-tombs emphasize the collective, the family. Rather than excluding the youngest members of their society, Judahites intentionally included infants and children in family burials. Using the lens of personhood, one can see that Judahite children, who had established some social relationships and are buried similarly to adults in their community, are transitioning into their place as family members in the afterlife. The motivation for including infants and children seems to be an effort to mark them as Judahite and so continue the Judahite family into the household of death. The impetus for this emphasis on Judahite families and ethnicity makes sense in the Iron Age II with the threat of foreign domination and the potential exile of the social elite. By marking the landscape with (deceased) households of Judahite families, the living could ensure that at least some of their extended family would remain in Judah in perpetuity.
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