Jephthah´s daughter, Sarah´s son. The death of children in late a

Sarah’s grief here is both blazing recrimination against her god, who has demanded the death her child, and her husband, who has aided and abetted the killing. The poet responsible for giving voice to her grief and anger put Sarah’s words at the disposal of Christian communities that had much need for mourning: in a period where as many as half of all children died before their tenth birthday, the laments of biblical figures, imagined and executed by homilist and hymnodists, could give voice to the suffering with which families and communities experienced the loss of a loved one.