Midwife

The midwife (meyaledet in Hebrew, from the root yalad, to bear a child) was a woman who assisted in childbirth and played an important social and religious role in ancient Israelite society. The earliest named midwives in Scripture are Shiphrah and Puah, the Hebrew midwives who defied Pharaoh's command to kill all male Hebrew infants at birth, fearing God more than the king (Exodus 1:15–21). Their act of conscience is the Bible's first recorded instance of civil disobedience, and they were rewarded with households of their own.

Midwives also appear in the birth narratives of Rachel (Genesis 35:17) and Tamar (Genesis 38:28), where they tied a scarlet thread on the first hand to emerge. The midwife's role included catching the child, cutting the umbilical cord, washing and salting the newborn, and swaddling it — a picture evoked in Ezekiel 16:4 as a metaphor for Jerusalem's origins.