This chapter asks how newborns were cared for and charts the formulaic regimen of encouraging babies to cry, watching them change colour, cutting their navel cord, searching their bodies for impediment, bathing them, swaddling them, putting them down to sleep and, finally, suckling them. Medical guides imagined that it would be mothers that did this care, but middling and elite families often hired nurses to manage this laborious regimen. These individuals were often already servants or recommended by family or friends. In the period, servants and others residing within the household were called ‘family’. In this way, making babies was a family project, albeit one in which family members did not have equal stakes and one in which mothers’ and other women’s procreative work was often subsumed within everyday expectations of domestic labour. Although nurses and others who carried out infant care were sought carefully, details about their lives and perspectives are often hard to find in family paperwork, which was often more interested in what procreative experiences said about the family and its name, rather than valuing others’ work.

In 1 Peter 2:1-3, the author compares believers to newborn babes who are to crave the pure, “wordly” milk in order to grow. This chapter examines the role of breastfeeding in socializing an infant in ancient society. Breastfeeding symbolized an infant’s Jewishness. In 1 Peter, believers’ metaphorical breastfeeding developed their Christian ethnic identity. As a maternal image, this chapter investigates Jewish use of transgender imagery. Though 1 Peter does not call God “mother,” it attributes maternal imagery to God the Father. In Jewish literature, God, and other men, are sometimes depicted with maternal imagery. In the New Testament, Paul describes himself in maternal terms. These traditions illustrate that the Petrine maternal imagery had Jewish and early Christian precedents. Finally, this chapter shows, first, that this Petrine imagery develops the ethnic identity of believers, and, second describes aspects of God’s relationship with believers in terms associated with motherhood. This Petrine imagery is a creative way of communicating theological truths but is still in continuity with Jewish and early Christian traditions.