THE PIOUS MIDWIVES

When now, in spite of all their tribulations, the children
of Israel continued to multiply and spread abroad, so that
the land was full of them as with thick underbrush--for the
women brought forth many children at a birth[11]--the Egyptians
appeared before Pharaoh again, and urged him to devise
some other way of ridding the land of the Hebrews,
seeing that they were increasing mightily, though they were
made to toil and labor hard. Pharaoh could invent no new
design; he asked his counsellors to give him their opinion of
the thing. Then spake one of them, Job of the land of Uz,
which is in Aram-naharaim, as follows: "The plan which
the king invented, of putting a great burden of work upon
the Israelites, was good in its time, and it should be executed