Quote:
Originally Posted by Belleweather  On the other hand, I'm not sure what I will do if we are blessed with another child and it's a boy. I've thought about it a lot. The commandment it's self is not something I can escape; it's very clear to me that we are being asked by God to do this, and that comes directly from God...it's not something that comes through rabbinical interpretation.
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I struggled with this issue for years (decades, actually), since my lineage is Jewish and I really believed -- or was brainwashed -- that the matter was a "done deal" as per instructions from God. Even though circumcision was completely repulsive to me and I could see on an intellectual level that it made no sense. It was a small factor in my conversion to Christianity in college.
Since then I've done a huge amount of research, and read some remarkable, scholarly books in the past few years that have really opened my eyes. Here is a summary I posted a little while back to another site:
Well, lots of people don't believe that God, or in this instance Yahweh, required circumcision at all. Much of the scholarly theological work of the past 20 years or so has come to the conclusion that circumcision was never prescribed by God, and that it was actually pushed by the (now discredited and gone) priests of Judaism as a way to rally and control the Hebrews when the priests were starting to lose their power. It was a practice well-known at the time (Babylonian period) but not generally practiced by the Hebrews, and the priests wove it clumsily back through their history, first orally and later in written form. It is not in dispute that the first 4 known iterations of the pentateuch (starting with what many now call the Book of J) make
no reference to infant circumcision; the fifth version - the basis for our current Old Testament - has a somewhat awkward chapter 17 that looks to be little more than an elaboration of Chapter 15, but with circumcision thrown in. Scholars refer to this latter version of the pentateuch (or Torah) as the Book of P, a reference to the priests who apparently re-wrote it.
The procedure the priests advocated wasn't awfully controversial; it involved cutting just the overhanging tip of the newborn's foreskin and even a father could do it more or less successfully with a knife. This seems to have been the course for about 300 hundred years until the Hellenic period, when it was highly out of fashion to be cut, and some younger Jewish men sought to reverse their half-circumcisions through stretching (epispasm). The rabbis became alarmed -- the corrupt priests were long-gone -- and ordered up a whole new type of circumcision contemplated nowhere in Genesis. This one came in 3 parts: cutting the skin (milah), tearing the binding synechia between the glans and foreskin of newborns (periah) and severing any skin that might touch the glans, and then sucking the wound for 30 seconds (metzitza). This rather severe new modification to circumcision also required the introduction of an entirely new profession also not mentioned anywhere in the Bible: the mohel, or skilled circumcision practitioner, since this newly prescribed surgery was unsafe in the hands of most new dads. The party thrown today (bris) so the community of friends and relatives can witness the newborn's foreskin being cut off also has no biblical or divine basis; it likely evolved as a way to prevent parents from backing out of the more extensive circumcision through peer pressure.
When examined critically, it seems pretty obvious that circumcision is man-made, not divinely ordained. Even if one were utterly convinced of the facts of Genesis 17 (a stretch, since even moderate scholars agree that Abraham was likely mythical), there is no evidence that the radical circumcision seen today had
anything to do with Old Testament instructions or practice. It emerged as an extreme response by clergy to perceived vanity in a culture that idolized male nudity and integrity.
If one accepts these historical facts, it stands to reason that God not only did not prescribe or condone the radical circumcision we see today, but it would be an affront. Not only do I take great comfort in knowing that my God did not order half the skin of my son's penis to be cut off; there is no way I'm going to piss God off by doing it. Mankind is nuts, both for coming up with outrageous practices and for perpetuating them.
. It lays out the evolution of the present-day pentateuch in some detail.
