A scholarly tradition exists linking the nursling-milk metaphor in 1 Pet. 2.1-3 with Jewish (or Jewish-Christian) motifs from, for example, the Odes of Solomon and Qumran. This article attempts to broaden the cultural associations of this metaphor to include the broader Greco-Roman world—specifically the role of the wet nurse, the idealized mother, and formative moral development of the child through breast-feeding and childminders (nutrix and nutritor). This article will then link these cultural referents to the rhetorical strategy of this section of 1 Peter's paraenesis.
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