This anthology is an important contribution to the T&T Clark series of handbooks, each of which offers a set of commissioned essays mapping the contours of a given discipline or subdiscipline. This volume considers the relatively new study of children in the biblical world, which was formally initiated in 2008 as a section of the Society for Biblical Literature.

The text begins with a thorough overview of the development of this and other child-attentive subdisciplines of theology and theological studies by Reidar Aasgaard, followed by a helpful discussion from Laurel Koepf Taylor of the ways that biblical studies has incorporated approaches and insights from the wider interdisciplinary domain of childhood studies. The remainder of the book follows in canonical order, with sections on both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament interspersed with two separate sections—one called “Intertextual Issues and Intertestamental Texts” and another titled “Early Christian Apocrypha.” The section called “New Testament” holds the most content, with six separate essays, largely because this section has seen the most development over the last few decades. The editors, however, have attempted to redress this imbalance by also offering five substantive contributions from authors considering topics related to the Hebrew Bible.

In their introduction, the editors observe that a different but equally seminal contribution in 2008 was The Child in the Bible, edited by Marcia Bunge, Terence Fretheim, and Beverly Roberts Gaventa. But this new book is poorly understood as an update of that first text, which mostly featured a range of celebrated biblical studies scholars inquiring about children for the first time—either by exegeting the place of children in particular books of the Bible or considering cross-cutting themes with implications for children—all in search of a deepened theology of children and childhood. Rather, this book gives considerably more space to understanding children's lives at the time that the Bible was being written and the times being written about by biblical authors—most notably in chapters that begin the sections “Hebrew Bible” (by Kristine Henriksen Garroway) and “New Testament” (by John Martens). These chapters go well beyond biblical texts to consider other sources of each era, as well as archaeological evidence that has the potential to expand and inform biblical exegesis. The remainder of the chapters in the book take up either particular texts—there are two chapters that consider the thorny challenges proposed by 1 Corinthians 7, while another considers the theme of diasporic childhood in Esther—or important intertextual themes, such as using contemporary understandings of traumatic violence and its impact on children as a lens for interpreting conflict narratives and their aftermath in the Hebrew Bible. Another important distinction of this book is that, whereas the 2008 volume was mostly written by professors teaching in Christian colleges and seminaries, this book is largely written by religion professors working at public universities. As such, although it has vital relevance to those doing biblical exegesis work related to children, it has a potentially wider audience.

This book fulfills each of the expectations a reader who understands the nature and purpose of the series it is part of may have. Its comprehensive approach to its subject matter and the thoughtful selection of a wide variety of authors—many of whom have already made notable contributions to the field—provide an excellent primer for anyone new to the topic and will be a reliable reference in the years to come as this field continues to develop. At the same time, with the global growth of research related to children, it is hoped that both this field of study and future editions of this text might be able to diversify their contributions beyond white Euro-American authors to embrace perspectives from scholars throughout the rest of the world who have often experienced childhoods more strikingly like those of the biblical world than we do in the privileged West.