ABSTRACT
Readers of the Bible find it an all-too-familiar and disturbing theme: the murder of innocent children. The violent plotline surfaces again and again in both Jewish narrative and Christian gospel: Pharaoh tosses newborn Jewish males into the Nile (Exodus 1:22); Herod slaughters all the Jewish children of Bethlehem and its neighborhood (Matthew 2:16); even God gets caught up in the action, slaughtering every Egyptian first-born human being and animal left unprotected by the blood sign (Exodus 11:12).And we are reminded of God's less than paternal dealings with other children: Job's ten children, Haman's ten sons, and those countless Canaanite children in the wrong place at the wrong time. Egyptian, Jewish, Persian, Canaanite innocents, all the objects of narrative violence.!
