In the biblical world, a blessing arrives as God's reward for human fidelity to the requirements of the covenant. The Bible mentions breastfeeding often, and always as a blessing. On realizing that she would bear Isaac, the elderly matriarch Sarah spoke in the same terms as the anonymous woman of Luke's gospel: “God has made laughter for me; Who would have said to Abraham that Sarah would suckle children? Yet I have borne him a son in his old age” (Gen. 21:6–7). At the end of the Book of Genesis, the patriarch Jacob proclaimed nursing motherhood among the greatest blessings of the covenant:
God Almighty . . . will bless you with blessings of heaven above,
. . . blessings of the breasts and of the womb. (Gen. 49:25)
The counterpart to a blessing, however, is a curse. A breach of the covenant could bring down God's wrath in the form of afflictions—covenant curses—and these usually appear as an inversion of the covenant blessings. A plentiful harvest is a blessing, for example, while a famine is a curse. So, just as birth and breastfeeding are prominent among the covenant blessings, chief among the curses are, according to the Prophet Hosea, “a miscarrying womb and dry breasts” (Hos. 9:14), representing sterility, barrenness, and the end of the family line.
The norm throughout the ancient Near East was to breastfeed a child from birth until the third (or fourth) birthday.2 The mother of the seven martyrs in the Second Book of Maccabees exhorts her youngest son to courage: “My son, have pity on me. I carried you nine months in my womb, and nursed you for three years” (2 Mac. 7:27). The legal requirements for priestly service seem to take this custom into consideration. A Levite child's duties began at age three (c.f. 2 Chron. 31:16); until then he was under the care of his mother. Similarly, Hannah turned her son Samuel over to tabernacle service “when she had weaned him” (1 Sam. 1:24); it is unlikely that she would have released an infant or a child of two to the care of the elderly priest Eli.
As a cultural commonplace, breastfeeding came readily to the mind of the sacred writers. Books in both the Old and New Testaments favor nursing and weaning as metaphors of God's care and His kingdom. For Isaiah, it is a metaphor for the abundance of the coming messianic age:
You shall suck the milk of nations, you shall suck the breast of kings;
and you shall know that I, the LORD, am your Savior
and your Redeemer, the Mighty One of Jacob. (Is. 60:16)
In that day, prosperity will return to Jerusalem, which is portrayed, in Isaiah's final oracles, as a nursing mother to God's people:
“Rejoice with Jerusalem, and be glad for her, all you who love her;
rejoice with her in joy,
all you who mourn over her; that you may suck and be satisfied
with her consoling breasts;
that you may drink deeply with delight from the abundance of her glory.” For thus says the LORD:
“Behold, I will extend prosperity to her like a river,
and the wealth of the nations like an overflowing stream; and you shall suck, you shall be carried upon her hip,
and dandled upon her knees. As one whom his mother comforts,
so I will comfort you;
you shall be comforted in Jerusalem.” (Is. 66:10–13)
In the New Testament epistles, the apostles favor breastfeeding as the metaphor for spiritual formation, especially in its earliest stages. The apostle is like a nursing mother to the newly baptized, and his “milk” is the word of God. In his first letter, Saint Peter exhorts his readers and hearers: “Like newborn babes, long for the pure spiritual milk, that by it you may grow up to salvation” (1 Pet. 2:2). In a similar way, Saint Paul tells the Corinthians: “I fed you with milk, not solid food; for you were not ready for it” (1 Cor. 3:2). And the Letter to the Hebrews applies the metaphor to put arrogant Christians in their place:
For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need some one to teach you again the first principles of God's word. You need milk, not solid food; for every one who lives on milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, for he is a child. (Heb. 5:12–13).
In both Testaments, mother's milk is a blessing. The curse is the “dry breasts.” Yet, sometimes God's people deliberately choose the accursed way. In Lamentations, Jeremiah depicts this most vividly as a mother denying her child the milk of her breast:
Even the jackals give the breast and suckle their young, but the daughter of my people has become cruel, like the ostriches in the wilderness. The tongue of the nursling cleaves to the roof of its mouth for thirst. (Lam. 4:3–4)
Indeed, Jesus saw those days of lamentation returning, a day when people would consider the greatest blessings of the covenant as curses, and the curse of dry breasts as a blessing: “For behold, the days are coming when they will say, ‘Blessed are the barren, and the wombs that never bore, and the breasts that never gave suck!’” (Lk. 23:29). Luke surely intends these words of Jesus to evoke the blessing pronounced earlier in the Gospel by the anonymous woman in the crowd. Could there be any more vivid illustration of the contrast between blessing and curse?