So many women in the Bible are nameless, either someone's wife or someone else's mother, or just "a woman." But this is not true of the two who appear in Exodus 1:8.

The days of the ascendancy of foreigners in Egypt has come to an end. A new pharaoh rules and he is manifestly uneasy about the Hebrew population living on the eastern border of his country. They must be eliminated.

His first attempt is to kill them by hard work. He does not succeed since they seem to thrive on forced labor. So Pharaoh summons the midwives and gives orders that they are to kill all baby boys at birth. (With erroneous biblical biology that persisted down through the Middle Ages, men were the sole generators of human life. A pregnant woman was just a walking incubator.)

The midwives are named for us: Shiprah and Puah. They stand in the presence of Pharaoh and defy him by the most bare-faced of lies. And what do they say? Simply that Hebrew women were different from Egyptian ones, and they didn't need midwives. They gave birth before the midwife could arrive.

The Pharaoh knew so little about the Hebrews that he believed they were indeed a race apart. He places the burden on killing the boys upon all his people when he decrees: "Every boy that is born to the Hebrews you shall throw down into the Nile, but you shall let every girl live." My inclination is to admire the two midwives and ready myself for the birth of Moses.

But it was only in reading God's Secretaries by Adam Nicolson that I discovered how important Shiprah and Puah eventually became.

James I, newly minted King of England and head of the Church of England, was presented with a quarrel within his church over two translations of the Bible into English, the Bishop's Bible and the Geneva Bible. The latter had notes on the texts and the one for the midwive's story in Exodus reads: "Their disobedience was lawful, but their deception was evil."

James was furious. He saw sedition in their failure to obey royal authority. He was definitely on Pharaoh's side. And so he authorized a new translation, free of notes, the King James version took form with its resonate 17th century English that shaped hundreds of English authors and countless believers.

Would it ever have come into being without Shiprah and Puah's audacity to stir things up?

There are no minor characters.