Parents Eating their Children – The Torah’s Curse and Its Undertones in Medieval Interpretation

Rashi also finds child death in 26:16, וּזְרַעְתֶּם לָרִיק זַרְעֲכֶם  “you shall sow your seed to no purpose” offering as a possible interpretation of the phrase:

כנגד הבנים והבנות הכתוב מדבר שאתה עמל בהן ומגדלן והחטא בא ומכלה אותם…

The verse is speaking about sons and daughters, whom you worked hard to raise, and whom sin comes and destroys…

The text continues, reinforcing this theme:

^{דברים כח:נד} הָאִישׁ הָרַךְ בְּךָ וְהֶעָנֹג מְאֹד תֵּרַע עֵינוֹ בְאָחִיו וּבְאֵשֶׁת חֵיקוֹ וּבְיֶתֶר בָּנָיו אֲשֶׁר יוֹתִיר. ^כח:נה מִתֵּת לְאַחַד מֵהֶם מִבְּשַׂר בָּנָיו אֲשֶׁר יֹאכֵל מִבְּלִי הִשְׁאִיר לוֹ כֹּל בְּמָצוֹר וּבְמָצוֹק אֲשֶׁר יָצִיק לְךָ אֹיִבְךָ בְּכָל שְׁעָרֶיךָ. ^כח:נו הָרַכָּה בְךָ וְהָעֲנֻגָּה אֲשֶׁר לֹא נִסְּתָה כַף רַגְלָהּ הַצֵּג עַל הָאָרֶץ מֵהִתְעַנֵּג וּמֵרֹךְ תֵּרַע עֵינָהּ בְּאִישׁ חֵיקָהּ וּבִבְנָהּ וּבְבִתָּהּ. ^כח:נז וּבְשִׁלְיָתָהּ הַיּוֹצֵת מִבֵּין רַגְלֶיהָוּבְבָנֶיהָ אֲשֶׁר תֵּלֵד כִּי תֹאכְלֵם בְּחֹסֶר כֹּל בַּסָּתֶר בְּמָצוֹר וּבְמָצוֹק אֲשֶׁר יָצִיק לְךָ אֹיִבְךָ בִּשְׁעָרֶיךָ.

^Deut 28:54 He who is most tender and fastidious among you shall be too mean to his brother and the wife of his bosom and the children he has spared ^28:55 to share with any of them the flesh of the children that he eats, because he has nothing else left as a result of the desperate straits to which your enemy shall reduce you in all your towns. ^28:56And she who is most tender and dainty among you, so tender and dainty that she would never venture to set a foot on the ground, shall begrudge the husband of her bosom, and her son and her daughter, ^28:57 the afterbirth that issues from between her legs and the babies she bears; she shall eat them secretly, because of utter want, in the desperate straits to which your enemy shall reduce you in your towns.

Translation from James Pritchard ed., Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating ot the Old Testament, 3^rd ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 534-540. My thanks to the TABS editors for directing me to this source. For more on this, see Deena Grant, “Loving God Beyond the Way You Love Ashurbanipal,” TheTorah.com (2016). See also, Marvin Sweeney, “How Do We Conceive the Divine?”TheTorah.com (2014).

The lifting of the siege and the fulfillment of Elisha’s prophecy forms the standard haftarah reading for Parshat Metzora: its narrative begins immediately after Jehoram’s threat. By contrast, the Samarian mother’s gruesome complaint is never read liturgically in Jewish settings.

Targum Neofiti has something similar, but Targum Pseudo-Jonathan to Lev. 26:29 chooses to leave out the historically specific “in Jerusalem”: 

וְתֵיכְלוּן בְּשַר בְּנֵיכוֹן וּבְשַר בְּנָתֵיכוֹן אָמַר משֶׁה נְבִיָא כַּמָה קַשְׁיָין הִינוּן חוֹבַיָא וּמָה מְרִירִין אִינוּן חַטְיָיאֵי דִי גָרְמוּ לְאַבְהָתָא לְמֵיכַל בְּשַר בְּנֵיהוֹן וּבְנָתֵיהוֹן עַל דְלָא נָטְרוּ מִצְוָתָא דְאוֹרַייְתָא.

And you will eat the flesh of your sons and the flesh of your daughters – The Prophet Moses said: “How heavy your guilt and how bitter your sins that can bring fathers to eat the flesh of their sons and daughters, since they did not keep the commandments of the Torah.”

See esp. Tal Ilan, “The Mother Who Devoured Her Son,” in Josephus and the Rabbis [בין יוספוס לחז”ל], (eds., Tal Ilan, Vered Noam, et al.; Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi Press, 2017), 713-730 [Hebrew].

It is interesting that the Ezekiel reference to parents eating children (and vice versa) mostly drops out of the rabbinic literature; perhaps this is because Lamentations looms so much larger in rabbinic reading practices, or perhaps it is because God promised Ezekiel in 5:9 that God’s vengeance on Jerusalem would happen only once, and this did not square with the history the rabbis had experienced.

As Julia Watts Belser notes in Rabbinic Tales of Destruction: Gender, Sex, and Disability in the Ruins of Jerusalem (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), p. 184 n. 19. Belser mentions Roman examples of the cannibalism-under-siege trope in Michael Sage, The Republic Roman Army: A Sourcebook, 282, where it features in Appian’s description of Scipio Aemilianus’s siege of Numantia in 134 B.C.E.; also see below for the recurrence of this theme in Josephus’ Jewish War.

Often the parallel verses in Deuteronomy are also unglossed, although the relationship between the two lies outside the scope of this essay. For Deut 28:53, Rashi follows a similar framework for the one I describe for ibn Ezra’s approach to Lev 26:29; he explains the eating of children as simply:

מחמת שיהיו צרים על העיר ויהיה שם מצוק עקת רעבון

Because the adversaries will lay siege to the city, and there will be distress – that is, famine.

A few verses earlier, at Lev. 26:26 (the curse of famine), Bekhor Shor does note that this describes בשעת חורבן, “the time of the [Temple’s] destruction.” But he leaves that unmentioned when it comes to v. 29:

אכלתם בשר בניכם – מקום שאמרתי: והפר{י}תי אתכם.

You will eat the flesh of your sons – in place of what I said “I will make you fruitful.”

For instance, given his travels after 1140, ibn Ezra might easily have heard about the extended period of drought and famine that paved the way for the northern African kingdom of Ifrīqiyya to come briefly under the control of Norman Sicily in the 1140s and 1150s. Evidence for this famine, often cited in Arabic sources, has been analyzed most recently by Matt King, “The Sword and the Sun: The Old World Drought Atlas as a Source for Medieval Mediterranean History,” Al-Masāq: Journal of the Medieval Mediterranean 29:3 (2017): 221-234. Less thoroughly corroborated (and probably more localized) famine conditions could also have taken place in a number of European locations where ibn Ezra traveled; see, for instance, Thomas Short’s claim that beginning in 1141 England experienced “a most dreadful and desolating famine, which continued 12 years.” (Short, A General History of the Air, Weather, Seasons, Meteors, & etc. in Sunday Places and Different Times [London: Longman and Millar, 1749, I.119.])

It is even easy to imagine this being a particular concern in thirteenth-century Jewish France. Abraham Grossman suggests that the growth in Ashkenazi women’s dowries, their increasingly central role in family-supporting businesses, and their overall enhanced economic status led directly to a series of twelfth- and thirteenth-century decrees limiting the husband’s inheritance from his wife, especially if she died during the first year of marriage, thus enhancing the wife’s ability to inherit from her husband. Cf. Grossman, Pious and Rebellious: Jewish Women in Medieval Europe (Waltham, Mass.: Brandeis University Press, 2004), 147-153.

Elsewhere, some of these same commentators do connect Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28 to the destruction of the Temple(s), but never this particular verse. See, e.g., Rashi on Lev 26:25, s.v. “veshalachti,” and 26:35; also, Bekhor Shor on Lev 26:26 and Deut 28:53.

Medieval Christians – unlike their Jewish counterparts – had no liturgical incentive to read the closing chapters of Leviticus on an annual basis, and their few standalone early medieval commentaries on Leviticus skipped chapter 26 altogether in favor of more engaging material. For example, the Latin Pentateuch commentary attributed to the Venerable Bede (but probably compiled in seventh-century Spain) ends its treatment of Leviticus at chapter 25 with a reading of the sabbatical year as it relates to an individual’s spiritual gifts. Cf.Patrologia Latina 91:357-8 for the relevant text, and for background (and a better edition!), Michael A. Gorman, “The Commentary on the Pentateuch Attributed to Bede in PL 91.189-394,” Revue Bénédictine 106 (1996): 61-108 and 255-307. Similarly, the ninth-century German Benedictine theologian Rabanus Maurus ends his Leviticus commentary by skipping from Lev 22:20 to the book’s final verse, Lev 27:34 (in Patrologia Latina 108:585-6. It seems that Leviticus 26 was simply not of great interest to these Christian theologians, and presumably also to their many early medieval contemporaries, who did not write Leviticus commentaries at all.

Twelfth- and thirteenth-century Europe was also an era in which Christians were fascinated by Jewish biblical interpretation, sometimes seeking to learn authentic “Hebrew” traditions and sometimes seeking merely to disprove it and marginalize post-biblical Jewish thought. On the intellectual marginalization of Jewish thought by Christian scholars, see Anna Sapir Abulafia, Christians and Jews in the Twelfth-Century Renaissance (New York: Routledge, 1995). Abulafia is arguing against an older view of Jewish-Christian exegetical cooperation during this period, as described in Beryl Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages (South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, 1964) and Herman Halperin, Rashi and the Christian Scholars (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1963). Certain Christian individuals and groups did learn extensively from Jewish textual traditions and from individual scholars, but it is not clear that this led to any consistent change in how Jews themselves were viewed. (See Rebecca Moore, Jews and Christians in the Life and Thought of Hugh of St. Victor [Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1998] for a particularly good example.)

Jewish readers will immediately think of the commentary tradition of Rashi, which is a very good working analogy for what the Glossa represented to medieval Christians; in the New Cambridge Bible History chapter on the Latin Bible from 900 to 1546, Frans van Liere simply describes the Glossa as “the most influential Bible commentary of the Middle Ages” (NCBH vol. 2, p. 100). For more detail on the Glossa, see Lesley Smith, The Glossa Ordinaria: The Making of a Medieval Bible Commentary (Leiden: Brill, 2009). For an exploration of Christian commentary traditions that puts the Glossa in context, see several of the essays in Karlfried Froelich, Biblical Interpretation from the Church Fathers to the Reformation (Burlington, Vt: Ashgate, 2010).

 Glossa to Lev. 26:10: “Comedetis: Vetus lex et prophetae, etc., isque ad et induimus novum.” In PL 113:374. (A critical edition or standard English translation for this part of the Glossa is still lacking as of this writing.)

 Glossa to Lev. 26:25: “Gladium: spiritus, quod est verbum Dei, quod per praedicatores Judaeos convincit, ne Vetus Testamentum habere cum Eangelio contradicant.” To Lev. 26:27: “Sin autem, etc.: Non solum legislator est Moyses, etc., usque ad et auctorem legis blasphemaverunt.”

 Glossa Ordinaria on Lev. 26:29: “Carnes filiorum. Id est discipulos, quos vobis assumitis in filios, ad eamdem doctrinam verbis validis, et animam corrumpentibus inducatis.” In PL 113:374.

From the Latin “post illa,” “after these” or “according to these” – the following phrase being something like “words of holy scripture”—in other words, a Bible commentary.

Hugh of Saint-Cher, Postilla to Lev. 26:29: “Carnes filiorium, &etc. Hoc ad literam saepe factum est Judaeis. Unde 4 Reg. 6 f[olio] dixit qaedam mulier ad regem Israel. Mulier ista dixit mihi: Da mihi filium tuum, ut comedamus eum hodie, et filium meum comedemus cras, coximus ergo filium meum, et comedimus eum. Thren 4b: Manus mulierum misericordium coxerunt filios suos, facti sunt cibi earum in contritionem filiae populi mei.” See Hugonis Cardinalis Opera Omnia in Universum Vetus et Novum Testamentum (Venice: Nicolaus Pezzana, 1703), I.125. For more on Hugh’s biblical commentary, start with the several relevant essays in Gilbert Dahan, Louis-Jacques Batillon, and Pierre-Marie Gy, eds.,Hugues de Saint-Cher (+1263): Bibliste et Théologien(Turnhout: Brepols, 2004).

A few Jewish exegetes did make the connection with the only other child-eating reference in the Hebrew Bible – in fact, it’s mentioned briefly in Bekhor Shor’s commentary on Deut. 28:53 – but not with the verse from Leviticus and not with Hugh’s assumptions that this constituted some sort of historical Jewish norm.

On the Hebrew knowledge reflected in Nicholas’ Postillaand his complicated views toward actual Jews and their conversion, cf. Deanna Copeland Klepper, The Insight of Unbelievers: Nicholas of Lyra and Christian Reading of Jewish Text in the Later Middle Ages (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2007).

Nicholas of Lyra, Postilla to Lev. 26:29: “Ut comedatis carnes filiorum vestrorum et filiarum vestrarum. Quod fuit impletum in obsidione Samarie, ut habetur 4 Reg. vi. etc. Et in obsidione Hierusalem per Titum et Vespasianum; ut dicit Josephum librum de Judaico Bello.” From the edition entitled Postilla litteralis in Vetus et Novum Testamentum (Venice: O. Scotus, 1488).

This story appears in Flavius Josephus’ De bello Judaico/The Jewish War VI.3.4 [201-213]:

There was a certain woman that dwelt beyond Jordan, her name was Mary; her father was Eleazar, of the village Bethezob, which signifies the house of Hyssop. She was eminent for her family and her wealth, and had fled away to Jerusalem with the rest of the multitude, and was with them besieged therein at this time. The other effects of this woman had been already seized upon, such I mean as she had brought with her out of Perea, and removed to the city. What she had treasured up besides, as also what food she had contrived to save, had been also carried off by the rapacious guards, who came every day running into her house for that purpose. This put the poor woman into a very great passion, and by the frequent reproaches and imprecations she east at these rapacious villains, she had provoked them to anger against her; but none of them, either out of the indignation she had raised against herself, or out of commiseration of her case, would take away her life; and if she found any food, she perceived her labors were for others, and not for herself; and it was now become impossible for her any way to find any more food, while the famine pierced through her very bowels and marrow, when also her passion was fired to a degree beyond the famine itself; nor did she consult with anything but with her passion and the necessity she was in. She then attempted a most unnatural thing; and snatching up her son, who was a child sucking at her breast, she said, “O thou miserable infant! for whom shall I preserve thee in this war, this famine, and this sedition? As to the war with the Romans, if they preserve our lives, we must be slaves. This famine also will destroy us, even before that slavery comes upon us. Yet are these seditious rogues more terrible than both the other. Come on; be thou my food, and be thou a fury to these seditious varlets, and a by-word to the world, which is all that is now wanting to complete the calamities of us Jews.” As soon as she had said this, she slew her son, and then roasted him, and eat the one half of him, and kept the other half by her concealed. Upon this the seditious came in presently, and smelling the horrid scent of this food, they threatened her that they would cut her throat immediately if she did not show them what food she had gotten ready. She replied that she had saved a very fine portion of it for them, and withal uncovered what was left of her son. Hereupon they were seized with a horror and amazement of mind, and stood astonished at the sight, when she said to them, “This is mine own son, and what hath been done was mine own doing! Come, eat of this food; for I have eaten of it myself! Do not you pretend to be either more tender than a woman, or more compassionate than a mother; but if you be so scrupulous, and do abominate this my sacrifice, as I have eaten the one half, let the rest be reserved for me also.” After which those men went out trembling, being never so much aftrighted at any thing as they were at this, and with some difficulty they left the rest of that meat to the mother. Upon which the whole city was full of this horrid action immediately; and while every body laid this miserable case before their own eyes, they trembled, as if this unheard of action had been done by themselves. So those that were thus distressed by the famine were very desirous to die, and those already dead were esteemed happy, because they had not lived long enough either to hear or to see such miseries. (Whiston trans.)

Of course, this is the same trope applied to the same situation as the stories of Doeg ben Yosef’s wife in Sifra “Bechukotai” and b. Yoma 38b, discussed above. But Josephus’ story is more horrifying, and it lacks any scriptural prooftext or divinely inspired lamentation.

See Karen M. Kletter, “The Christian Reception of Josephus in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages,” in H.H. Chapman and Zuleika Rodgers, eds., A Companion to Josephus(Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2016), 368-381.

Recent commemorations of the 871-day siege of Leningrad during World War II include a story, attributed to the Russian author Daniil Granin, of a mother who preserved her dead son’s body in order to feed it piece by piece to her surviving daughter. See http://www.dw.com/en/leningrad-the-city-that-refused-to-starve-in-wwii/a-19532957, among others.