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!

Comments

[nhradar.livejournal.com]

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. :)

[feir-fireb.livejournal.com]

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.

[orichalcum.livejournal.com]

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