Quote of the Day [orichalcum]

Exodus 1.15-20: Then the king of Egypt spoke to the Hebrew midwives, one of whom was named Shiphrah and the other was named Puah;
and he said, "When you are helping the Hebrew women to give birth and see them upon the birthstool, if it is a son, then you shall put him to death; but if it is a daughter, then she shall live." But the midwives feared God, and did not do as the king of Egypt had commanded them, but let the boys live.
So the king of Egypt called for the midwives and said to them, "Why have you done this thing, and let the boys live?" The midwives said to Pharaoh, "Because the Hebrew women are not as the Egyptian women; for they are vigorous and give birth before the midwife can get to them." God was good to the midwives, and the people multiplied, and became very mighty.

I'm teaching this passage today. Things I find intriguing about it:

1. Two midwives, for the Hebrew population? That implies a fairly low total population, unless there really are lots of women delivering w/o midwives.
2. Birthstools - attested for at least 3000 years. And why did I have to lie on my frakking back and do sit-ups for 1.5 hours again?
3. One of the genetic mutations traced back to the pre-Diaspora Jewish population is correlated with high fertility and easy delivery. Perhaps the Hebrew population really is multiplying at higher rates than their Egyptian neighbors and giving birth quickly!

Today, I get to make my students do math - they're tracing all the references to different population figures in Exodus and trying to come up with a plausible single answer. And people claim I'm not interdisciplinary!

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Heh heh. Are there going to be scatterplots and linear regressions??? That sounds like a really interesting exercise to me (probably not surprising, I admit).

I find it very interesting that they have been able to trace any mutations that far back, and also very interesting that they've found that particular mutation. My own family seems to reproduce very easily but with very long delivery times.

Also, I don't understand about the lying-down birthing either. I understand some places are going back to squatting at least for the early labor?

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"2. Birthstools - attested for at least 3000 years. And why did I have to lie on my frakking back and do sit-ups for 1.5 hours again?"

Because American doctors aren't willing to get down on the floor to deliver babies?

Really, the more I learn about the disconnect between the way we give birth in this country, and the way we *should* give birth, the more appalled I am.

I sort of had the impression that the hospital you used was pretty progressive. But they still put you in a regular bed? Did they strap you in a fetal monitor, too?

The hospital where I delivered the first time was supposedly cool about using different laboring and birthing techniques, but they were also super-fast to get me on an IV and that severely limited my mobility and hence my ability to use most of the alternative methods.

Re: the two midwives, as I commented on the phone today, at least one commentator says that Shifra and Puah were the head midwives, not the only midwives. OTOH, if they were the only two (which I don't believe), it would make sense that the Hebrew women could deliver before they got there, since the two of them would be incredibly overextended!

Oh, and there's a popular midrash claiming that Shifra and Puah were actually Yocheved and Miriam.

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Basically because people didn't want to get on the floor to catch the babies.
I went through heck trying to convince people not to strap me down with a monitor and epidural (cuz lying on your back hurts more!), and in the end, still had to because a C-section was insisted on.
I asked for the squat bar and portable monitor and sent everyone into a tizz when they had to go find those things.

Assume the ancient Hebrew birthrate, as a pre-modern society that valued children and had no effective contraception, is somewhere in the ballpark of the highest developing nations today, 40-50 per 1,000 people, for which newborns and young mothers are also a disproportionately large portion of the population.

At a maximum, a very busy midwife who had assistants might be able to handle multiple births per day, making ~1000 births per midwife per year an unrealistic but remotely plausible upper bound. Such a life would be incredibly stressful without modern medical technology. A birth every couple of days for one person is more reasonable. Call 100 a more reasonable estimate, verging on the lower bound.

Assume also that some fraction of children are born sans midwife. An order of magnitude larger or smaller seems drastic, so for the purposes of an estimate simply put it at parity.

This means that a given midwife accounts for ~100 births per year, possibly as much as 1000 under a particular paradigm. Two midwives therefore account for ~200-2000 births per year. Assuming 40-50 births per 1000 people, that's 4000-50,000 people, though probably closer to the low end unless midwives typically supervised a number of people. I would imagine these bounds are not unreasonable for a pre-modern town or large migrant clan. A higher birthrate is actually inversely correlated with the amount of population represented by a given midwife, as higher birthrates require a larger fraction of the population to be midwives.

But the Hebrews kept good... Numbers. They Torah talks about the Exodus containing tens of thousands of soldiers per tribe, and some 600,000 adult males making monetary donations. So even if the adult males comprise a full half of the population, we're talking about well over a million people, with well over 20,000 births per year.

So I'm guessing that either these midwives are representatives of a larger number (spokespeople?) or the only ones who happened to be accounted (possibly the midwives of whichever tribe ended up passing down the most accepted stories... Levi, being priestly?), or in some sort of supervisory role (particularly likely if they were posing as "collaborators", whose primary job at this point was not so much to help give birth but rather to make sure that the rest of the Hebrew midwives were kept in line).

Anyways, those are the first thoughts of someone who doesn't actually need to take this course for credit or a grade.

Another possible explanation is that midwives were actually something of a luxury, allowing for maybe an order of magnitude more population (40,000-500,000 per midwife). That's still not going to account for everything. But it would also mean that midwives were particularly prestigious.

Well, or that there were some...exaggerations in Exodus. One of the main theories of the modern historical critical scholars is that there were many fewer people than listed, given that 600,000 people would be an enormous fraction of the Egyptian population, which seems pretty high given the lack of any documentation in Egypt. Losing a few hundred or a thousand slaves would be an easy omission. Hiding the economic impact of the exodus of a third or more of the population...harder. Also, there's no evidence of graves anywhere in the wilderness areas they'd have to have gone through, despite a lot of looking. While groups of people can of course leave no trace, it's much, much harder for hundreds of thousands of people to leave no trace, especially in the desert environment.

The various (three?) accounts of the exodus, too, hint that there might be some artistic license being employed in the story.

Ori, I think you missed the most significant part of the story. The midwife...she was named. :)

Hmm. There's an interesting take in Wikipedia from a Hebrew University professor that suggests a the numerical discrepancy is more a matter of misinterpretation (600 alaphim=600 units, not 600 thousands), in which case the Hebrews might have had ~6000 fighting men and less than ~20000 people total, which becomes within the range of plausibility for 2 midwives.

Yeah, I mentioned that in class - both midwives are named, and even get speaking lines!

Wow did you just get some mental images stuck in my head! Ouch.

I always liked that passage. :) We read it during our Passover seders.

I read the first paragraph as Pharoah speaking to two of the Hebrew midwives, not necessarily to all of them.

We have definitely lost a lot of natural birthing wisdom over the years...

That is certainly a logical interpretation, but it doesn't fit the text, which is explicitly "to one" and "the other."

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