Shiphrah and Puah, the Hebrew Midwives

Rashi, the French commentator (1040 to 1105), reads Shiphrah from a verb for making fair, because she put each newborn into good condition. He reads Puah from a verb for crying aloud, because she soothed the crying child. He takes both readings from the Talmud, tractate Sotah 11b, and for Puah he points to the verb of Isaiah 42:14.

Strong's lexicon glosses shaphar as to glisten or be fair, and shepher as beauty. It glosses pa'ah, the verb of Isaiah 42:14, as to scream.

The Hebrew of Exodus 1:15 can be read as the Hebrew midwives or as the midwives of the Hebrew women, as Albert Barnes notes in his Notes on the Old Testament. The Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament, reads the midwives of the Hebrews and spells their names Sepphora and Phua.

Josephus, in his Antiquities of the Jews (book 2, chapter 9), calls them the Egyptian midwives. Matthew Henry thinks the king could never have expected Hebrew women to kill the sons of their own nation. Barnes notes that the women bear Egyptian names and were probably Egyptians.

John Calvin answers that Josephus conjectured falsely, since the women feared God before the king spoke to them. Keil and Delitzsch say plainly that they were Hebrew women. Strong's lexicon glosses each name as an Israelitess.

The Babylonian Talmud, in tractate Sotah 11b, records two views of the rabbis Rav and Shmuel. In one the midwives were a mother and her daughter, Jochebed and Miriam, and in the other a mother-in-law and her daughter-in-law, Jochebed and Elisheba, the wife of Aaron. Rashi gives the first view in his commentary on Exodus 1:15, and Ibn Ezra calls the tradition of mother and daughter correct.

Exodus itself makes no such link. It names Jochebed in Exodus 6:20, as the wife of Amram and the mother of Aaron and Moses, while in Exodus 2 the mother and the sister of Moses go unnamed.

The Hebrew word behind families in Exodus 1:21 is houses. Albert Barnes reads the verse as the midwives marrying Hebrews and becoming mothers in Israel. Jamieson, Fausset & Brown say that in Hebrew idiom to make a house means a numerous offspring.

In Calvin's reading the word them in Exodus 1:21, masculine in the Hebrew, means the Israelites, whose houses multiplied through the midwives. Rashi, after the Talmud, reads the houses as the priestly line descended from Jochebed and the royal line from Miriam.

Augustine, in Against Lying, says that what God rewarded in the midwives was their mercy to His people, and that He forgave their deceit for the sake of that mercy. He adds that they would have done better to refuse the king plainly and die, for a reward far greater than the families they were given.

John Calvin holds that the two women lied, and so sinned, and that God bore with the fault because they had acted with courage. Keil and Delitzsch say the reply deceived the king, and they quote Augustine on what God rewarded.

John Lightfoot, as Calvin's editor quotes him, objects that it would be no hard thing to show that what the midwives said was most true.

Matthew Henry sees no reason to doubt the truth of the reply. He holds that the Hebrews were then under an extraordinary blessing of increase, so that the mothers had quick and easy labour. Adam Clarke reads the reply as a plain statement of fact, since women who worked hard in the fields through pregnancy gave birth with ease.

Lightfoot, as the same editor reports, called the words of the midwives a glorious confession of their faith.

John Calvin objects that the midwives did not confess their piety to the king, while Exodus 1:17 says they let the boys live because they feared God.