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The Hebrew Bible contains multiple texts in which mothers eat their children. Deuteronomy 28, Lam 2 and 4, and 2 Kgs 6 all offer variations on the theme of maternal cannibalism. While these passages are often written off as gruesome, exceptional, or motivated by extreme necessity (such as starvation), such approaches miss the literary and ideological significance of maternal cannibalism. This study, in contrast, approaches the biblical accounts through another body of literature with its own rich assembly of cannibalistic mothers: the classic fairy tales. Reading with fairy tales surfaces four important points: (1) starvation is insufficient to explain cannibalism; (2) cooking children, as much as eating them, is narratively significant and should be analyzed as such; (3) some mothers are indeed Bad Mothers, even as (4) cannibalism does not preclude affection and love-including at least some mothers who cannibalize their children. Taken together, these principles challenge the assumed norms of maternity, while offering new ways of reading and responding to the cannibal mothers of the Hebrew Bible.
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Among the Hebrew Bible's many mothers-Eve "the mother of all living" (Gen 3:20), the matriarchs and slave mothers of Genesis (Gen 16-34), the faithful Hannah (1 Sam 1) and the powerful Athaliah (2 Kgs 8), the bereaved Naomi and Job's nameless wife (Ruth 1; Job 1-2)-we find, as well, a handful of mothers who are also cannibals. In fact, the Hebrew Bible contains multiple texts that describe mothers eating their children. In Deut 28:53-57, breaking the covenant is punished with a series of hardships, climaxing in a famine so bleak that the starving woman will give birth and eat not just her newborn but her placenta as well. In the book of Lamentations, cannibalism is part of a larger landscape of suffering and devastation; mothers begin to eat "the children they have borne" (Lam 2:20). The cannibalism returns two chapters later, when "the hands of compassionate women boil their children," reducing them to food (Lam 4:10). And in 2 Kgs 6:24-30, we find an extended prose narrative about maternal cannibalism. In a time of extreme famine, two nameless women make a survival pact: first they will kill and eat one woman's son, then the other's. After the first cannibal meal,...