Birth

This heading is treated narrowly. There is no entry for the fact of being born, the genealogy of birth, or the new birth; the heading collects two ideas only: the pangs of giving birth, and the original ordination of those pangs as sorrow. Most of the verses are prophetic similes in which the labor pains of a woman become a figure for terror, judgment, or collapse. The relevant UPDV verses are quoted below in the wording they actually carry.

Travail as the Image of Terror

Six of the seven prophetic and poetic references gathered under "pangs in giving" use childbirth pain as a simile for something else — usually the panic of a city or army about to be overrun. In the Korahite psalm the foreign kings who assemble against Zion break before they engage: "Trembling took hold of them there, Pain, as of a woman in travail." (Ps 48:6). Isaiah's oracle against Babylon describes the day of Yahweh in the same terms: "they will be dismayed; pangs and sorrows will take hold [of them]; they will be in pain as a woman in travail: they will look in amazement one at another; their faces [will be] faces of flame." (Isa 13:8). The prophet himself absorbs the figure when he sees the burden of the wilderness of the sea — "my loins are filled with anguish; pangs have taken hold on me, as the pangs of a woman in travail: I am pained so that I can't hear; I am dismayed so that I can't see." (Isa 21:3).

Jeremiah uses the same image three times in succession. Daughter Zion is heard "as of a woman in travail, the anguish as of her who brings forth her first child" (Jer 4:31), with the qualifier "first child" sharpening the simile from labor in general to the unfamiliar shock of a first delivery. The defenders of Jerusalem react to the report of the northern army with "anguish... [and] pangs as of a woman in travail." (Jer 6:24). And in the day of Jacob's trouble the figure is inverted: "Ask⁺ now, and see whether a man travails with child: why do I see every [able-bodied] man with his hands on his loins, as a woman in travail, and all faces have turned pale?" (Jer 30:6). The plural-you marker (⁺) signals that the prophet is addressing the audience as a whole, and the bracketed [able-bodied] flags an interpretive gloss on the Hebrew adjective; the picture is of fighting men holding the posture of a woman in labor.

One verse breaks the pattern by treating childbirth as something other than a figure of doom. In Jeremiah's promise of return, the gathered remnant is enumerated as a mixed procession: "with them the blind and the lame, the pregnant woman and her who travails with child together: a great company they will return here." (Jer 31:8). Here the woman in active labor walks with the returning company rather than standing in for a frightened city — birth is one of the conditions Yahweh is willing to gather rather than wait out.

The Edenic Ordination of Pain

A second grouping isolates a single verse. In the sentence on the woman after the transgression, the pain of childbearing is set as a divine ordination rather than a contingency: "To the woman he said, I will greatly multiply your pain and your conception; in pain you will bring forth sons; and your desire will be to your husband, and he will rule over you." (Gen 3:16). UPDV reads two coordinated objects of "multiply" — pain and conception — and renders the recurring labor as bringing forth "sons" rather than the more abstract "children." This is the verse on which the prophetic similes lean: the figure works because the audience is presumed to know that birth is, by ordination, the sharpest pain a body undergoes.

Related Headings

The BIRTH heading points outward to two other entries which are treated on their own pages: see Abortion for the case of the pregnant woman struck during a fight and the prophetic petition for a miscarrying womb, and (when the entry exists) the heading for CHILDREN for the gathered material on infants and the young.