Women and Children under Siege: Re-reading Biblical Texts in light of Child Abandonment in South Africa

Abstract

The position of women and children in ancient times and today was/is never promising, because they are too often exposed to suffering, hunger, high levels of violence, abandonment, homelessness, and death. Often when the word for ‘child (olale/teknon)’ appears, violence and suffering are surrounding them. Thus, scholars regard 2 Kings 6:24-31 as a juvenile text of terror and a cannibal text of the Old Testament, contra to a text for example Mark 7:24-30 in the New Testament. In dealing with these texts, male-centred and adult-centred biblical interpretive approaches are mostly utilized. These interpretive approaches judged and blamed women as ‘murderers’ who ‘feed on their children’ rather than seeing the women as victims of a highly patriarchal society. Therefore, there is a need to read these texts through the ‘lenses’ of mothers and children. Biblical trauma hermeneutics, employing the ‘lens’ of trauma, will be utilised to interpret these biblical texts. This biblical trauma approach has a purpose for survival, recovery, and resilience to those suffering in and outside the context of the text. This paper seeks to reread and re-interpret 2 Kings 6:24-31 from a gender-childist-trauma perspective considering the manifold stories of abandoned children in South Africa.