אֹבֶן

From the study of Exodus 1:16

Range of meaning

A dual form ('a pair of') of 'even, 'stone'. It appears only twice in the Hebrew Bible. In Jeremiah 18:3 it is the potter's wheel, two stone discs on an axle, one turned by foot and one carrying the clay. In Exodus 1:16 it is the equipment of childbirth, which most lexicons (BDB, HALOT) take as a birthstool of two stones or bricks.

Against the English

KJV 'stools', BSB 'birthstools', WEB 'birth stool', NIV 'delivery stool', ESV 'birthstool'. YLT goes its own way with 'have looked on the children'. The Greek Septuagint and Latin Vulgate drop the object and paraphrase it as 'when they are about to give birth'.

How it drifted

'Stool' makes a modern reader picture a piece of furniture you sit on. The Hebrew says 'the two stones': a pair of bricks or stones a woman squatted or knelt on, so the baby dropped into the gap between them and into the midwife's hands.

Used elsewhere in the period

Egyptian evidence fits closely. The Egyptian word for the birth brick, meskhenet, was also the name of a goddess who presided over birth and destiny. The Westcar Papyrus (Middle Kingdom story cycle) shows goddesses acting as midwives at a royal birth. A painted mud birth brick showing a mother with her newborn was excavated at South Abydos (Wegner 2002). The Egyptian hieroglyph for 'give birth' shows a kneeling or squatting woman with the child emerging below her. On the Jewish side, the Aramaic Targum Onqelos has matbera, 'the birthing place'. The Babylonian Talmud (Sotah 11b) records several opinions. One links the word to the potter's wheel in Jeremiah 18:3, picturing the mother's thighs on either side with the child between. Another hears a 'sign' in it: the mother's thighs grow cold as stones.