ABSTRACT
Humans are cooperative breeders, meaning that parents depend on a wider community of kin and non-kin to raise their child. The warm idea of the village raising the child has a darker side when the village declines to cooperate in the hard and prolonged work of raising a child. The community may decide that a child is unwelcome because it is illegitimate, disabled, female, or born into an impoverished family that requires more help than they are prepared to give. Infant abandonment stories reflect this darker side of humans’ social nature because they necessarily focus on unwanted children. The essay analyzes two Hebrew infant abandonment stories (Moses and Ishmael) and thirteen Greek stories. Each story reflects wider social factors that inform the decision to abandon the child, but the variable differ across the Hebrew and Greek corpora. The Hebrew stories focus on the poverty of the mother, while Greek stories describe illegitimate births, abandonment due to adverse prophecy, and preference for male children. The Hebrew and Greek stories appear to reflect diverse evaluations of infant abandonment as permissible (Greek) or undesirable (Hebrew).
