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Home > Magazines > BAR > January/February 1998

First Person: A Name in Search of a Story

An Egyptian papyrus reveals an Asiatic slave with a Biblical name—a midwife mentioned in Exodus

By Hershel Shanks

It would be easy to tell you how a story in BAR develops, but I thought I would instead tell you how a story didn’t develop—at least not yet. The tip came from a lawyer, a faithful reader from Brooklyn named Harvey Herbert: An Egyptian hieroglyphic papyrus now in the Brooklyn Museum mentions an Asiatic slave named Shiphrah. Shiphrah, of course, is the name of one of the Hebrew midwives (the other is Puah) whom Pharaoh summoned to carry out his order that all boys born to the enslaved Israelites be killed (Exodus 1:15). Shiphrah (and Puah) didn’t obey […]

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Endnotes

1.

William C. Hayes, A Papyrus of the Late Middle Kingdom in the Brooklyn Museum [Papyrus Brooklyn 35.1446] (New York: Brooklyn Museum, 1955).

2.

William F. Albright,“Northwest Semitic Names in a List of Egyptian Slaves from the Eighteenth Century B.C.,”Journal of the American Oriental Society 74 (1954), pp. 222–233.