Chapter 4 - Child Sacrifice

Summary

This essay examines accounts of child killings in Egyptian monastic culture through the lens of various textual and visual sources: the Greek Apophthegmata Patrum (Sayings of the Desert Fathers), paintings of the sacrifice of Jephthah’s daughter and the averted sacrifice of Isaac at the monasteries of Saint Antony on the Red Sea and Saint Catherine at Sinai, and exegesis of the same biblical narratives by the Egyptian monk Shenoute and other ascetic authors. The textual and visual representations of these killings or attempted killings are paradoxically theologically, politically, andsocially generative. They reaffirm priestly authority and theological orthodoxy in the monasteries at the same time as they invite male monks to identify with both male and female exemplars. Child sacrificerepresented not merely an ascetic injunction to abandon family, but, perhaps more radically, an ascetic reproduction of monastic community and genealogy.