Did the Ancient Israelites Think Children Were People?
Personhood in the Hebrew Bible
T. M. Lemos
June 21, 2025
35 Comments
71492 views
Some years ago, I was teaching a course on the first five books of the Bible. When the class session on the 10 plagues in Exodus came around, an interesting discussion ensued among the students about the plague of the firstborn and whether or not the Israelite deity was morally justified in killing Egyptian babies. After some handwringing, one student in the class chimed in: “Since they were babies, they were innocent, so they went straight to heaven.” His friend then replied flatly, “By that logic, abortion is the best thing ever invented.”
This fifth-century B.C.E. relief on a Phoenician funerary monument from Pozo Moro, Spain, is commonly interpreted as a scene of child sacrifice in an underworld banquet. A seemingly two-headed monster, who may well be a Phoenician deity, holds in his right hand a bowl containing a child and grasps with his left hand the leg of a piglet. Photo: Rafael dP. Iberia-Hispania licensed by CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.
My students were getting at something important in this awkward exchange. The Book of Exodus presumably reflects the views of its Israelite authors on their deity, morality, and the like. Why, we then have to ask, would the Israelites have imagined their deity Yahweh slaughtering children for sins the children themselves had not committed? If they thought children could be killed for the transgressions of others, did they even think children were persons with any type of rights?
What do I mean by “persons” exactly? A person, in my usage and that of many anthropologists, is a human being accorded status and recognition in their society. A person is an individual who is seen as having value—not economic value like a sheep or a llama, but social value, value in relationships with others. A person is typically seen as having agency and afforded certain rights, such as the right to seek redress in cases of harm. Personhood is an abstract concept. One might say it is too abstract to be useful. But discussions of personhood arise generally only in the most pressing situations—when we are discussing what we can do to human beings and their bodies. Can we terminate human bodies, execute them, torture them, commit mass killings against them? These are the situations in which personhood comes up, and if you are someone who is undergoing torture because you are seen as subhuman by the individual torturing you, personhood is anything but an abstraction to you.
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When read with an eye to matters of personhood, the Exodus narrative is a rather chilling one, as my students’ comments demonstrate. And this narrative is not alone among texts in the Hebrew Bible in leading readers to call into question whether or not the Israelites saw children as persons. We even read in the storied 10 Commandments: “I, Yahweh, your god, am a jealous god, punishing children for the iniquity of parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me” (Exodus 20:5 in English versification; Deuteronomy 5:9). Either the Israelites who wrote this did not see children as persons, or their conception of personhood was a collective one that allowed children to be punished for the sins of parents. We see this type of collective punishment at play in, for example, Numbers 16 and Joshua 7.
What about child sacrifice? There are many Biblical texts that condemn this practice; doesn’t that tell us that the Israelites did see children as persons worthy of protection? Unfortunately, the matter is more complicated than this, as we also find Biblical texts such as Ezekiel 20 and Exodus 13:1–2 and 22:29–30 (in the English) that suggest that some Biblical writers thought that Yahweh actually demanded child sacrifice. In 2 Kings 3, a king sacrifices his son to avert disaster, and the sacrifice actually works!
Some Biblical scholars would counter that child sacrifice was a foreign practice. The origins of child sacrifice seem beside the point, however. If the Israelites, or some Israelites, thought children should be sacrificed, this seems indicative that children lacked personhood in their eyes. Other indications of this can be found in the fact that parents could sell off children to pay off debts the parents themselves had incurred (Exodus 21:7–11; Nehemiah 5) and that parents could control whether daughters who had been raped had to marry their rapists (Exodus 22:16–17, English) and whether drunkard sons should be executed for being drunks (Deuteronomy 21:18-21). Some Biblical texts describe children getting eaten—eaten!—in times of crisis (e.g., 2 Kings 6:28-29; Ezekiel 5:6-10; Lamentations 2:20, 4:10), and a text or two even portrays Yahweh as threatening the Israelites with catastrophes so severe that they would devour their own children (Leviticus 26:27-29; Deuteronomy 28:53-57).
Child killing, child selling, child eating—the picture that emerges is a bleak one. However, before the savvy reader gets exasperated, let me state that, yes, there are Biblical passages that paint a quite different portrait of children’s status. The Book of Genesis is filled with passages implying that the Israelites were really, really interested in having children. Other books contain examples of the same thing—a desire for and valuation placed on having progeny. Parents make vows to secure progeny and to keep progeny, they feel content in having progeny, and they mourn lost progeny.
But is this longing for progeny the same as assigning personhood to children? We could answer this question more easily if we could speak and interact with real Israelites. Since we can’t do this and since the Israelites revealed their views of personhood indirectly rather than through philosophical treatises on the subject, we are left having to read through the lines. At best, the Israelites held a view of personhood that allowed for collective punishment and saw children as low-level subordinates subject to the wishes and whims of parents—usually fathers. At worst, they were not seen as persons. We seem to see a sort of graduated personhood in some Biblical texts, with older children having more claim to personhood than infants. (Fetuses, as we see in Exodus 21:22–25, where the unborn are assigned only financial value, are out of luck.) This may be why it appears that it was infants rather than older children who were sacrificed.
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We also see in the Bible disagreements between Israelites over the personhood of children. The fact that so many Biblical texts discuss child sacrifice tells us that some Israelites thought this practice was necessary or at least advantageous. This seems a particularly apt conclusion when these texts are read alongside archaeological and other evidence from elsewhere in the ancient world showing that child sacrifice really was practiced in certain locales. However, the fact that so many Biblical texts decry child sacrifice also tells us that many Israelites thought this practice was unacceptable. One can see in this disparity a disagreement over the personhood of children, or perhaps of infants in particular.
A final point is that status in Israelite society was not attached to particular ages as is the case in our society. There were no Israelite quinceañera parties where teenagers danced the night away celebrating their newly achieved personhood. Eighteen-year-old Israelites couldn’t breathe a sigh of relief knowing their parents would no longer be able to have them killed for drinking too much undiluted wine or leaving their sandals in the entryway for the umpteenth time. No, Israelite personhood was based on social role and physical maturity, not chronological age. It was also mutable and in some cases highly ambiguous to us as modern readers. Despite the desire of students of the Bible to find certitude within its pages, the Biblical corpus refuses to satisfy us on this score. More vexing, still, since the clearest statements on the status of children are some of the most troubling, the certitude offered is not always helpful. In other words, today’s teenagers had better hope that their parents look somewhere other than the Good Book for guidance on what to do with them when they find that cheap bottle of vodka stowed away under the piles of dirty laundry.
T. M. Lemos is Associate Professor of Hebrew Bible at Huron University College and a member of the graduate school faculty at the University of Western Ontario. Her most recent book is Violence and Personhood in Ancient Israel and Comparative Contexts (Oxford Univ. Press, 2017); it discusses the personhood of children in much greater detail, as well as the personhood of other groups in ancient Israel, ancient West Asia, and contemporary America.
Related reading in Bible History Daily
What Does the Bible Say About Children—and What Does Archaeology Say?
All-Access members, read more in the BAS Library
Child Sacrifice at Carthage—Religious Rite or Population Control?
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This Bible History Daily Post was first published in April, 2018
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The word “children” didn’t always mean young people or the “children of Israel” would all be
just kids.
In all cultures, children are taught beliefs from an early age, even evil beliefs. And bloodline is important. Lev. 17:11 states, “The life of the flesh is in the blood.”God knew they would continue these beliefs/practices if left alive. God had to protect the Christline.
Have any of you researched child sacrifice in ancient Israel? Bible scholars agree it took place. Archaeologists have found sights where 20000 urns with the bones of infants have been found. Yawah was the son of El. Of course these religions would have overlap. You all are just having an emotional response to the article and sound foolish.
No one thinks these people didn’t value their children but it’s hard not to agree that they weren’t seen as people, as in having the personhood rights many states now grant to embryos.
Personally I don’t think the people of Israel thought they had personhood rights. With a god as horrible and murderous as Yawah it’s understandable.
The Egyptian people are the ones that targeted babies, male Hebrew babies.
The plague – not Israelite people – targeted all Egyptian firstborns, regardless of age, regardless of species, perhaps regardless of gender, as a result of the Egyptian peoples’ actions against Hebrew babies.
Perhaps if you had corrected your students you could have had a discussion on what is actually in the Hebrew Bible, rather than one built on a common misconception.
And then, the idea of national responsibility does not just spring up our of nowhere in Exodus. We see it in the expulsion from Eden, the cursing of the ground, the Flood, the dispersion from Shinar, the decrees against the descendants of Kenaan, the plague against Pharaoh and his house, Sedom and Amora, etc.
Well reasoned.
There is a push-pull relationship in the Scriptures betw individual identity and corporate identity. Prophets like Jeremiah and Ezekiel bring out the individual — the soul that sins is the soul that dies — while the back and forth of curses and blessings before entering the Promised Land bring out the corporate nature of the God and Israel relationship. Even Abraham tugs at that thread when he asks God if He will sweep away the good with the bad in Sodom.
I read some of the reference scripture and immediately felt that this writer is playing fast and loose with scripture. Perhaps she is playing the devils advocate for a purpose. As Mrs Jim says, for one thing, ‘children’ does not always mean young people, but even the grown-up progeny.
I continued thru some of her references only to see carelessly selected phrases with which most thoughtful readers would have no problem. I am no educated theologian, but I’m not sure the quality of this article belongs in Biblical Archaeology.
It seems that only if the reality of God’s perspective (not that I can even begin to lay absolute claim to it, of course) within the context of collective humanity is discounted, and if we are to view Semitic thought and practice only through a 21st century lens – only then can we conclude that personhood was a developmental process among the Israelis. On the other hand, the whole corpus of scripture, both Old and New Testament history, compels us to conclude that personhood exists within the context of the community, i.e., to belong to the community is to possess personhood. Why else would the despicable sacrifice of children have had any positive value whatsoever in swaying the “gods”? It was because they were persons that their sacrifice was thought to benefit the whole community. The idea that personhood is a developing process is relatively new. Personhood had to be legislatively stripped from Blacks and Native Americans; and misled abortion advocates today have done the same with the unborn infant to accommodate their selfish whims.
Ramifications of one’s actions vibrate throughout and belong to the whole human community. St. Paul, an Israelite’s Israelite appears to have had some awareness of this when he compares the sin of Adam, the consequences of which has been inherited by all humanity, with the rescue and restoration of the entire human community through the one sacrifice of the resurrected Jesus, Son of God and Son of Man.
In the Bible all lives ultimately belong to God who created them. If God took a life back, he alone had that right, it is irrelevant whether child or adult. He has taken either at various times. This has nothing to do with thinking that children were not persons.
Jesus lifted up children as He blessed them, used them as examples of true faith.
You state “In 2 Kings 3, a king sacrifices his son to avert disaster, and the sacrifice actually works!” This is not a sacrifice to Yahweh, as you claim, but to the Moabite god Chemosh.
I was under the impression that all the first born of any age were killed in Egypt and not just the children. If that is correct, it seems that the basis of the discussion is kind of mute. Also, I would think that there is a distinction between God taking lives (plague) and humans taking lives (abortion).
Do not be fooled GOD cannot be mocked.
GOD looks into ones soul SAFETY.
SPIRIT LIFE COMES FIRST..
PHYSICAL is temporary..
Deem assure all the children or person sacrificed or generation s visited by GODS justice Cuz of their parents hatred towards GOD..because of human Weakness..GOD has a special JUSTICE THAT REDEEMES THEM.
JESUS…
PS
ITS NOT WHAT WE KNOW THAT PLEASES GOD…
ITS THRU OBEDIENCE
First born males of any age were killed and not just humans but cattle as well. Not even pharaoh’s own family was spared. It was a just punishment for all the male Hebrew children killed when Moses was a baby (saved by being hid in a basket and later raised by pharaoh’s daughter).
Professor Lemos,
You write the following
“I, Yahweh, your god, am a jealous god, punishing children for the iniquity of parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me” (Exodus 20:5 in English versification; Deuteronomy 5:9). Either the Israelites who wrote this did not see children as persons, or their conception of personhood was a collective one that allowed children to be punished for the sins of parents.
You need to pay closer attention to who made that statement as the author is clearly stated: Yahweh (God), not any Israelite – Moses simply transcribed the Voice spoken from Sinai. Reading the Bible as a whole and putting that statement in context, you will find that it is no arbitrary decree whereby God literally punishes children for their parent’s sins. The family of Achan as a whole was killed because they all knew the sin of their father and helped cover it up when he was burying the forbidden treasures from Jericho under his tent.
Elsewhere you will see that Korah was killed for his rebellion against Moses. Moses noted that God spared the children of Korah. These children were righteous before God and their descendents can be seen praising God in other parts of Scripture.
Note Ezekiel 18:20 which says, “The one who sins is the one who will die. The child will not share the guilt of the parent, nor will the parent share the guilt of the child. The righteousness of the righteous will be credited to them, and the wickedness of the wicked will be charged against them.”
So how are the children punished for their parents’ sins? “Children are not punished for parents guilt, except there’s they participate in their sins. It is usually the case, however, that by inheritance and example the sons become partakers of the father’s sin. Wrong tendencies, perverted appetites, and the base morals, as well as physical disease and degeneracy, are transmitted from father to son, to the 3rd and 4th generation.” We see this played out again and again throughout Scripture. A wicked king will beget a wicked king and several generations will pass until one follows the Lord.
Professor, why did you choose your field of study when it is readily apparent that you do not see Scripture as being inspired but rather no different than any other ancient text?