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.
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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.
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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. :)
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