And God said to Abraham, “As for you, you must keep my covenant, you and your seed after you throughout their generations. This is my covenant … every male of yours must be circumcised. When you circumcise your foreskin flesh, it will become a covenant sign between me and you. Throughout your generations, each male of yours must be circumcised when he is eight days old … And my covenant will be in your flesh as an eternal covenant.
(Genesis 17:9–13)
In many human societies, group membership is marked with a special costume—whether a kilt, a sari, a military uniform, a navy blue suit or a black yarmulke. Even in societies that wear minimal clothing, status and affiliation can be conveyed by special tokens and ornaments. But these, like garments, can be removed at will.
Permanent scarification and tattooing are more permanent and presumably more ancient methods to mark membership. Because these operations are painful, submitting to them constitutes a true rite of passage. Stoically undergoing the ordeal demonstrates mature self-discipline and seriousness of purpose. Ever after, one carries a life-long “membership card” engraved on one’s body.
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Even more radical than scarification is excision of part of the body, such as a finger, as is practiced among some Native American tribes. This might be regarded not just as a marking but as a kind of partial self-sacrifice to the capricious Powers—akin to a lizard surrendering its tail to escape a predator.1 The technical, albeit controversial, term for such an operation is “initiatory mutilation.”2
Among all the body parts that can be removed with minimal risk to the individual, one in particular has been seized upon by many cultures: the foreskin of the penis, also called the prepuce.3 Circumcision—the removal of the foreskin—is practiced in many cultures—in Melanesia-Australia, Africa, the New World and Southwest Asia. Judaism is just one of the world’s many civilizations employing circumcision as a permanent token of social status.
In some ways, the foreskin is ideal for this purpose: The operation is relatively safe, and the membrane, while providing a degree of protection and lubrication for the penis, is necessary neither to survival nor to reproduction.
But in one other respect, circumcision is extremely peculiar as a social marker: Its mark is concealed. Thus, it is a sign mainly for the person who bears the mark (and also for his sexual partners). It seems paradoxical: How can an unseen sign signify? Is circumcision even older than clothing?
However that may be, the penis possesses one overriding advantage as a group marker: It is the male organ of procreation. Circumcision naturally signifies membership in a hereditary group or caste. The circumcised man possesses a certain status that his sons will inherit when they undergo the operation in their turn.
Some investigators have proposed other health-related advantages of circumcision. They suggest that the ancients were familiar with some of the various hygienic virtues of circumcision, such as the decreased incidence of infection or of penile cancer (and of cervical cancer for partners), the alleviation of painful swelling (phimosis), etc. Current medical opinion holds that 025the advantages and disadvantages of the operation are more or less balanced and in any case slight.4 But this need not have been true in antiquity, when different standards prevailed, and the zones of health and ritual purity intersected. Who knows what syndromes most afflicted our ancestors and which were considered tolerable and which intolerable?
Because circumcision set Jews apart in the later Greco-Roman and Christian worlds, most people assume that the original intent, the “covenant sign” of Genesis 17 (quoted at the outset of this article), was to distinguish Jew from Gentile, or Israelite from foreigner. But this is wrong.
As we learn from the Bible and from extrabiblical sources, circumcision was the norm in the Levant.5 The Philistines were called “the foreskinned” (hā‘ărēlîm) because their practice of not circumcising distinguished them, not just from Israel, but from all the other peoples of Syria-Palestine.
Indeed, Genesis 17 does not actually say that circumcision is a sign for others. How can it be, since it is covered? Rather, it is a sign “between you and me.” That is, the all-seeing God beholds the mark beneath the clothes and recognizes the bearer as his own. And the man, every time he sees his nudity, recalls his obligations to God under the covenant. It is thus a private sign, comparable to the blue tassel that God instructs the Israelites to wear on their garments as a reminder of his commandments (Numbers 15:37–41; Deuteronomy 22:12). Anybody may be circumcised; anybody can wear a tassel. But for the Israelite, these are special signs of Israelite identity and of obligation to God.6
In Genesis 17, God mandates that Abraham’s sons and his sons’ sons be circumcised on the eighth day of life, as is still Jewish practice. This may not have been the original Israelite custom, however. Worldwide, circumcision is more commonly performed upon boys as a rite of passage into social adulthood.7 The penis is “unwrapped” to betoken its readiness for its true business. Although Genesis locates the origin of eighth-day circumcision in the hoary patriarchal past, modern scholars attribute Genesis 17 to the Priestly Source, which by its language and ideology is later than other 026narrative materials in Genesis and Exodus.8
Five stories in the Bible suggest that in Israel, too, circumcision once functioned as a rite of passage into adulthood.
According to Genesis 17:24, Abraham underwent circumcision at the age of ninety-nine, but this was clearly an exceptional case. His elder son Ishmael, however, was circumcised at 13, the approximate age of social-physical adulthood (Genesis 17:25). When the text next focuses on Ishmael, it is as the ancestor of Arabian tribes (Genesis 25:12–18). That is, after his circumcision he is a married, procreative adult. To this day, Arabs and Muslims, who claim Ishmael as their literal or spiritual ancestor, practice circumcision, although it is not mandated in the Qur’an, and the age of circumcision varies from region to region.
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In Genesis 34, when the men of Shechem propose to marry Jacob’s daughters, his sons Simeon and Levi rejoin that it would be a shame to intermarry with the uncircumcised. In context, this scruple is really a ruse. When the men of Shechem circumcise themselves in order to unite with Jacob’s clan, they are slaughtered by Simeon and Levi. In any case, the story presupposes a connection between circumcision and matrimony: To enter into the latter, one must first undergo the former.
In Exodus 4:24–26, Israel’s God Yahweh attacks Moses (or perhaps his son) when Moses is en route to Egypt to rescue Israel. To avert the assault, Moses’ wife Zipporah grabs a handy flint and circumcises their son. She then applies something covered with blood—the knife? the foreskin? the boy’s penis?—to someone’s—presumably Moses’—“feet”—probably here a euphemism for penis—saying, “You are a bridegroom (ḥātān) of bloodiness for me.” Thereupon the attack ceases. This, comments the narrator, is why one pronounces the phrase “bridegroom of bloodiness” upon circumcision. The story is hard to follow, but it appears to be some kind of explanation of why circumcision is associated with marriage.9
First Samuel 18:17–27 makes humorous use of the circumcision-marriage connection. When King Saul offers David the opportunity to marry (ḥtn) two of his daughters, the cantankerous monarch sets an unusual bride-price: 100 Philistine foreskins. This David accomplishes and more. Apparently for 200 foreskins (but not all the manuscripts agree), he gets two daughters of Saul: Michal and Merab. The Philistines surrender their prepuces to the brides’ father (ḥōtēn). (It is a moot point whether the Philistines are circumcised dead or alive; the latter would presumably have been more challenging for David and more disgraceful for the Philistines.) The point here is that instead of David the son-in-law (ḥātān) getting circumcised as a preparation for marriage, some hapless Philistines are circumcised.
There is also the story of Gibeath-haaraloth (literally, “Foreskins Hill”) near Gilgal, where the Hebrews, upon entering the land, undergo a mass circumcision of boys and men, again accomplished with stone tools. According to Joshua 5:2–9, “Yahweh said to Joshua, ‘Make flint blades and circumcise the Israelites again a second time.’ So Joshua made himself flint blades, and circumcised the Israelites by Gibeath-haaraloth” (Joshua 5:2–3).10 When the operation is complete, God comments, “Today I have rolled back (gallôtî) the contempt of the (circumcised) Egyptians from you,” evoking both the name of the nearby town of Gilgal as well as the operation of rolling back the foreskin.
The collective implication of these five stories, combined with ethnographic parallels and scholarly theories of the Torah’s composition, is that the Israelites did not originally practice infant circumcision. Instead, the operation was a rite of passage into maturity.
Why and when was circumcision transferred to infancy? Many factors were doubtless involved:
Infant circumcision removed the element of choice. Perhaps, over time, fewer boys or their parents were willing to enforce the painful custom. This led the authorities to change the age of circumcision.
Infant circumcision was perceived as more humane. Babies seem to experience the pain less than juveniles and adults, and the trauma is soon forgotten.11
A circumcised infant would possess a higher status, as a party to the covenant since birth. One could even imagine parents competing to initiate their sons 029earlier and earlier, until reaching the absolute limit of about a week.12
We have seen that circumcision originally functioned as a boy’s rite of passage into adulthood, away from the world of women and into the world of men. Around the world, the initiation of adolescents draws heavily upon the symbolism of death and rebirth. If circumcision was already linked symbolically to rebirth, it would have been a short step to transfer it to actual birth, when the boy literally leaves his mother. One could even imagine that the foreskin surrounding the penis was conceived as a kind of vagina, from which the boy must emerge. Excising the prepuce would thus be tantamount to fully severing the child’s connection with his mother and completing the birth process.13 Eventually, the boy’s mate will re-cover his penis during intercourse.14
Naturally, moving the operation to infancy undermined the immediate psychological effect upon the initiate, the effect that is so crucial. Only in years to come will a boy learn the significance of the ordeal whose trauma he has forgotten or suppressed. So far as we know, ancient Israel never replaced circumcision with an alternative rite of adolescent male initiation. Only millennia later would Judaism create a far milder initiation: the Bar Mitzvah, whereby a boy exercised his legal manhood by standing at the Torah before the community.
Even nowadays, and far more so in antiquity, infant circumcision entails a certain risk. With so much infant mortality, why make matters potentially worse by deliberately wounding babies? I believe that infants were circumcised precisely because they were likely to die. The prophet Ezekiel implies that Sheol (the Underworld) has two tiers: a worse level for those who were slain by the sword or who died uncircumcised, and a better one for the circumcised who received honorable burial (see Ezekiel 28:8–10, 31:18, 32:18–32). Still today, the saddest of Jewish rituals is the circumcision of a stillborn child before his consignment to the ground. Thus, just as most Christian sects would adopt infant baptism due to the likelihood that any given child would die before adulthood, so one can imagine Israelites over time moving up the age for circumcision.
All the foregoing are plausible rationalizations at best. But customs are notoriously difficult to change by deliberation and fiat. More satisfying would be a sociological explanation for the shift in age of Israelite circumcision. A stimulating albeit controversial article by historian Baruch Halpern has at last provided 044a realistic context.15 Halpern marshals archaeological evidence and teases out the implications of biblical and extrabiblical texts to document the detribalization of Israelite society beginning in the eighth century B.C.E., a combined product of Judean royal policy and the upheaval of the Assyrian invasions. The result, he claims, was a revolution in Israelite mores and ethics, in fact the birth of individualism—not just the individual human but also the individual Deity.
Although Halpern does not develop this angle, I think that the age of circumcision was lowered as a part of detribalization. In cultures practicing the circumcision of boys and young men, the rite is typically performed en masse, as all the boys of a settlement periodically assemble to be circumcised by their elders. In Israel, one popular site for mass circumcisions was presumably Foreskins Hill near Gilgal. And a popular occasion was probably Passover, which possesses a peculiar association with both the circumcision ritual and the city of Gilgal: As the Book of Exodus stresses, apropos of the Paschal offering, “no one ‘foreskinned’ may eat from it” (Exodus 12:44, 48). And Joshua 5:10 records that directly after the circumcision at Foreskins Hill, Israel celebrated their the first Passover in the land. One could imagine that the original Israelite male rite of passage was circumcision followed by admission to the Passover feast.
Presumably, however, not all boys could make it to Gilgal. If performed upon entire cohorts, circumcision would perforce have been a clan ritual, originally carried out throughout the land at various “high places,” or local shrines, against which the Bible frequently fulminates. But with detribalization, sacrifice became a centralized affair licit only in Jerusalem, or at any rate most efficacious there. And circumcision, required on each boy’s eighth day of life, became a family celebration, as it has remained to this day.
Beyond this article’s purview is the later history of circumcision: how it set Jews apart in the Greco-Roman world; how the Greeks found the habit particularly repellant; how Jews encountered problems in the Hellenistic gymnasium; how some surgeons succeeded in reconstituting the foreskins of assimilationist Jews (1 Maccabees 1:15; 1 Corinthians 7:18); how traditional Jews fought back by making the excision more drastic; how some drawn to Judaism shrank from being circumcised; how Paul and the church quickly discarded the operation under the New Dispensation (Acts 15:1, 21:21; Romans 2:25–4:12; Colossians 2:11–13; Galatians; 045Philippians 3:2–5); how medieval Christians meditated upon and even quested for Jesus’ foreskin as a holy relic; how Islam came to accord circumcision a quasi-secular, quasi-sacred status; how, centuries later, American doctors decided that all boys would benefit from circumcision as a deterrent to concupiscence and a host of ailments, so that virtually all American men came to bear the quintessential mark of the Jew; and finally how, in the late 20th century, many pediatricians began calling the practice into question, and some adults elected to have plastic surgeons restore their foreskins.16 As the pendulum swings back against routine infant circumcision, we may foresee the day when once again circumcision will be the exclusive mark of the Jew and the Muslim, reminding them of their common Near Eastern heritage.
And God said to Abraham, “As for you, you must keep my covenant, you and your seed after you throughout their generations. This is my covenant … every male of yours must be circumcised. When you circumcise your foreskin flesh, it will become a covenant sign between me and you. Throughout your generations, each male of yours must be circumcised when he is eight days old … And my covenant will be in your flesh as an eternal covenant. (Genesis 17:9–13) In many human societies, group membership is marked with a special costume—whether a kilt, a sari, a military […]
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See Walter Burkert, Creation of the Sacred (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1996), pp. 34–55.
2.
The controversy arises from the negative connotations of “mutilate.” Cultures that practice initiatory mutilation consider themselves not to be spoiling the body but perfecting it.
3.
Our oldest textual reference to the operation is an Egyptian inscription from 2300 B.C.E. A man boasts, “When I was circumcised, together with one hundred and twenty men, there was none thereof who hit out” (trans. by John A. Wilson in James B. Pritchard, Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament [Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1969], p. 326). Our first graphic depiction of the operation also comes from Egypt, from a bas relief at Saqqara dated to about 2400 B.C.E.
4.
The most recent, comprehensive study (ultimately coming down on the contra side) is David L. Gollaher, Circumcision: A History of the World’s Most Controversial Surgery (New York: Basic Books, 2000).
5.
See Propp, “The Origins of Infant Circumcision in Israel,” Hebrew Annual Review 11 (1988), pp. 355–370, esp. p. 355 n. 1.
6.
Apropos of the tassel: Many commentators emend the tautological “And it will be as a tassel for you” (wĕhāyâ lākem lĕṣîṣı̄t) (Numbers 15:38) to “And it will be as a sign for you” (wĕhāyâ lākem lĕ’ôt). This is as compelling as a conjectural emendation can be.
7.
The classic treatment is Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage, French original 1909, trans. M. Vizedom and G. Cafee (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1966), pp. 71–73. On rites of passage in the Bible, see Propp, “Symbolic Wounds: Applying Anthropology to the Bible,” Le-David Maskil: A Birthday Tribute for David Noel Freedman, eds. Richjard Elliott Friedman and William H.C. Propp (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2004), pp. 17–24.
8.
On modern theories of the Torah’s composition, see Richard E. Friedman, Who Wrote the Bible? (New York: Summit, 1987).
9.
The Semitic root ḫtn, which in Hebrew means “to become related through marriage,” bears an additional connotation in Arabic: “to circumcise.” Hebrew and Arabic are related languages; that is, like French and Spanish, they share a common ancestor. Because Arabic is vastly better attested than biblical Hebrew, scholars often look to Arabic to illuminate biblical obscurities. See John Kaltner, The Use of Arabic in Biblical Hebrew Lexicography Catholic Biblical Quarterly Monograph Series 28 (Washington, DC: Catholic Biblical Association of America, 1996). For fuller discussion of Exodus 4:24–26, see Propp, “That Bloody Bridegroom,” Vetus Testamentum 43 (1993), pp. 495–518; and Exodus 1–18, Anchor Bible 2 (New York: Doubleday, 1998), pp. 233–241.
10.
Many have suggested that the use of stone tools here and in Exodus 4:24–26 implies the perpetuation of a Stone Age custom. But cheap and effective stone tools continued in use throughout the Iron Age; see Steven Rosen Lithics After the Stone Age (Walnut Creek, CA: Alta Mira Press, 1997).
11.
Some would dispute the totality of amnesia, but certainly there is no conscious memory.
12.
A few bad experiences would have shown the inadvisability of circumcising newborns, since their blood congeals slowly. After the first week, the clotting factor is more efficient, making circumcision fairly safe for all but hemophiliacs—whom later Judaism exempts from the rite. In modern hospital conditions, however, the circumcision of newborns is not dangerous.
13.
While speculative, this makes more intuitive sense to me than the common theory that circumcision makes the bleeding penis into a symbolic vagina, reflecting Man’s envy of Woman’s procreative power (e.g., Bruno Bettelheim, Symbolic Wounds [London: Thames and Hudson, 1955]).
14.
Note that “vagina” comes from Latin “sheath.” For ethnographic evidence that circumcision removes femininity from a boy, who must seek out a mate to restore his original bisexuality, see briefly Gollaher, Circumcision, pp. 59–63.
15.
Baruch Halpern, “Jerusalem and the Lineages in the Seventh Century B.C.E.: Kinship and the Rise of Individual Moral Liability,” in Halpern and D.W. Hobson, eds., Law and Ideology in Monarchic Israel, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supp. Series 124 (Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Academic Press, 1991), pp. 11–107.
16.
See Gollaher, Circumcision, for a thorough discussion of all these issues.
