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Welcome to Season 4, Episode 28 of What Matters Most! T

In this episode I welcome my friend and colleague Kristine Henriksen Garroway to discuss her recent book The Dying Child: The Death and Personhood of Children in Ancient Israel (Oxford UP, 2025). Kristine is a prolific scholar and a ground-breaking archaeologist who works to bring to life ancient children, so often forgotten in archaeological and textual research.

Kristine Garroway is Professor of Bible at the Hebrew Union College Jewish Institute of Religion’s Skirball Campus in Los Angeles where she joined the faculty in 2011. She received her doctorate in Hebrew Bible and Cognate Studies at the Hebrew Union College/Cincinnati in 2009. She has spent time studying and researching in Israel and has participated in excavations at Ashkelon, Tel Dor, and Tel Dan. Garroway’s scholarship focuses on children using archaeology and texts of ancient Israel and Mesopotamia. She has published in various scholarly journals and is a regular contributor to thetorah.com. Garroway’s books include: Children in the Ancient Near Eastern Household (Eisenbrauns 2014) and Growing Up in Ancient Israel: Children in Material Culture and Biblical Texts (Society of Biblical Literature 2018). She is the recipient of the Biblical Archaeological Society’s 2019 Publication Award for Best Book Relating to Hebrew Bible.

The loss of children was something the ancients had to consider more often than we do, thankfully, but death is something none of us will escape and we probably do not think about it or consider it enough today. What does it mean to us? What does it mean that we will all die? This is something the ancients faced head on and I think we should consider in the same way. As Kristine writes, “The archaeological remains in the Judahite bench tombs show care for all members deposited there, stressing the importance of the continuity of the Judahite family unit and personhoods, including infants and children, in life as well as in death.” Thanks to Kristine Garroway for bringing these questions and the ancient children to us. Persons every last one of them.

A few thanks are in order. First of all, I am grateful to Martin Strong, who guides me in the podcasting world and joins me for the Pop Culture Matters regularly. Second, the episodes are edited, engineered, and produced by Kevin Eng who is the first listener to all the episodes and my consultant for each episode, especially with the snippets that begin each episode. Thank you, Kevin, for all of your expertise and support and especially for saving this episode when I could not convert it to a listenable or viewable file. Finally, to the Fang Fang Chandra, the CCE assistant, who helps me bring this podcast to you, but also makes the CCE run so much more smoothly.

I also want to thank our donors to the Centre, whose generosity enables this work to take place at all: Peter Bull, Angus Reid, and Andy Szocs. We are thankful to their commitment to the life of the academic world and of the work of the Church in the world by funding the work of the CCE. I am also thankful to the Cullen family, Mark and Barbara, for their support of the ongoing work of the CCE through financial donations that allow us to bring speakers to the local and international arenas.

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Since St. Mark’s Centre for Christian Engagement seeks to enable the creation of a culture of encounter and dialogue, let me invite you into that discussion. Follow us at our Instagram page, @stmarkscce and drop us a line as to what you want to see or hear. We’ll post there with a question as to what you are most interested in. Or email us with your suggestions to [email protected] or [email protected].

John W. Martens