Circumcision

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Circumcision is the cutting away of the foreskin of the penis, practiced across many cultures and far older than any of the religions that made it a sign — the ancient Egyptians cut, and so did peoples of the Levant and the Horn of Africa before the patriarchs are placed in history. But in the Abrahamic traditions the cut carries a weight no other body can give it: it is the bodily mark of belonging to a covenant, an agreement between God and a people written, irreversibly, into the flesh. The Hebrew scriptures place its origin in a command to Abraham. In the seventeenth chapter of Genesis God establishes a covenant and requires that every male of the household be circumcised — Abraham himself at ninety-nine, his son Ishmael at thirteen, the slaves born in the house and those bought with money, all in a single day, and every male thereafter on the eighth day after birth. The flesh of the body is made the standing token of an agreement said to bind the line forever. What is at stake, in the texts’ own terms, is membership: the uncircumcised male is to be cut off from his people, the word for excision turned back on the man who refuses the excision. To be marked is to belong; to be unmarked is to have broken the bond.

The covenant in the body

The choice of sign is not arbitrary. Among the commandments of the Pentateuch circumcision is unique in being inscribed on the organ of generation — the place where the line is continued — so that the covenant said to bind the seed of Abraham forever is sealed precisely where the seed is carried. It is borne in the most private part of the body and shown to no one, and yet it is the most public of allegiances, the one that cannot be put off with a change of clothes or of country. A man may forget the covenant; his body cannot. This is the logic the later tradition reads back into the Genesis command: the covenant is not a contract held in the mind, to be honored or neglected as conviction rises and falls, but a fact established in the flesh, prior to memory, made on the infant before he can assent and standing whether he assents or not.

That permanence cut both ways under persecution. When the Seleucid king Antiochus IV moved to abolish Jewish practice in the second century before the common era, the books of the Maccabees record that circumcision was forbidden on pain of death, and that mothers who circumcised their sons were executed with the infants hung about their necks — the rite became, in that crisis, the line over which martyrdom was chosen. The Hellenizing party, by contrast, is said to have had the mark surgically disguised, undoing the sign in order to pass unremarked in the gymnasium, where men exercised naked. The same flesh that bound a man to the covenant could expose him to those who would destroy it, and the choice to keep or hide the mark became a choice about which people one belonged to. The episode is preserved in the Hellenistic-Jewish corpus gathered, in English, in R. H. Charles’s Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha.

Brit milah — the covenant of circumcision

In Judaism the rite became the brit milah, the covenant of circumcision, performed on the eighth day and treated as one of the gravest of obligations. So grave that, alone among the positive commandments, its appointed day overrides the Sabbath: where almost every act of cutting is forbidden on the seventh day, a circumcision falling on the eighth day that happens to be a Sabbath proceeds regardless, the obligation of the covenant outweighing the rest of the holy day. It is the act by which a male infant is brought formally within the people of Israel — the entry, not the confirmation, of belonging — and around it later law and custom built a whole order of persons and words: the mohel, trained in both the surgical act and the law that governs it; the sandek, who holds the child; the seat set apart and called the chair of Elijah, the prophet imagined present at every covenant; and a liturgy of blessing that names the child for the first time and gives thanks to the one who sanctified the beloved from the womb and set the covenant in the flesh. A man who is not circumcised is the arel, the uncircumcised, a word that becomes in the prophets a figure for anything closed, stopped, or unresponsive — uncircumcised lips that cannot speak, an uncircumcised ear that cannot hear. The female line is brought within the covenant by birth and not by a parallel cutting; why the sign falls only on the male body, and what it means that half the people bear no bodily mark of the bond, is a question the tradition has turned over without settling.

The foreskin of the heart

The same scriptures that command the cutting also speak of circumcision in a register that is not surgical at all. The book of Deuteronomy charges Israel to circumcise the foreskin of the heart and be no longer stubborn, taking the language of a bodily rite and turning it inward, toward something like an unstopping of obstinacy — the heart, in Hebrew anatomy the seat of will and understanding, imagined as overgrown, hardened, in need of the same paring the flesh receives. The image returns, intensified, when the prophet Jeremiah summons the men of Judah to circumcise themselves to the Lord and remove the foreskins of their hearts, lest the divine anger break out like a fire none can quench; and he sharpens it to a paradox when he says that the whole house of Israel is circumcised in the flesh yet uncircumcised in heart — the outward mark intact, the inward thing undone, the sign present and its meaning absent. Deuteronomy presses the paradox the other way as well: in one place Israel is commanded to circumcise its own heart, in another the Lord promises to circumcise it for them, so that they will love him with their whole heart — the same act named first as a human duty and then as a divine gift, the will told to cut itself and told that it cannot.

Whether the inward sense was meant to deepen the outward rite or to relativize it is a question the texts hold open, and one their later readers answered in opposing ways. For the prophets the two are not yet rivals: the circumcised people are reproached for an uncircumcised heart, the bodily sign assumed and the inward one demanded on top of it. But the language, once minted, could be turned against the flesh it borrowed from. A metaphor that says the real circumcision is of the heart can be made to say that the bodily one no longer matters — and that reading, latent in the prophets, became explosive when a movement arose that wished to admit outsiders without the knife.

The fault line in early Christianity

That ambiguity became the sharpest of the early disputes within what would become Christianity. The first followers of Jesus were circumcised Jews who kept the law, and the question of whether Gentile converts must also be circumcised — must, in effect, become Jews in the body in order to follow a Jewish messiah — provoked a crisis the movement nearly did not survive. The Acts of the Apostles records the confrontation: teachers from Judea insisting that without circumcision after the custom of Moses there could be no salvation, and against them the missionaries to the Gentiles, until a gathering at Jerusalem in the late 40s of the first century ruled that the converts need not be cut. The Acts of the Apostles frames the decision as a relief laid on the new believers, a yoke not bound on necks that had not borne it.

The theology behind the ruling was supplied above all by Paul, in letters that scholarship dates to the mid-first century, the oldest writings in the Christian canon. His most sustained treatment stands in the Epistle to the Romans, where he takes up the very prophetic language of the heart and presses it to its limit: the true circumcision, he argues, is of the heart, in the spirit and not in the letter, and a man who keeps the law though uncircumcised is reckoned the true Jew, while the circumcised man who breaks it has made his circumcision into uncircumcision. The outward mark counts for nothing apart from the inward reality; the Jew is one inwardly, and the praise of such a one comes not from men but from God. Mainstream Christianity followed him. Circumcision ceased to be required of its adherents, and the rite that had been the entry into one covenant was replaced, in Christian practice, by baptism as the entry into another — a washing in place of a cutting, both read as the threshold of belonging. The metaphor of an inward cutting-away survived long after the practice was let go: the Christian scriptures go on to speak of a circumcision made without hands, a circumcision of Christ, the stripping away of the body of flesh — the figure outliving, in this case, the thing it figured.

Philo of Alexandria — the letter and the meaning held together

Among Jewish interpreters of the Hellenistic world the allegorical and the literal were not set against each other but held in tension, and no one held them in that tension more deliberately than Philo of Alexandria, the first-century Jewish philosopher who read the Torah as a Platonist reads a sacred text. Philo gives circumcision a full allegorical sense: it is the emblem, in his reading, of the excision of pleasure and of the passions that crowd in upon the soul through the body, and beyond that of a subtler arrogance — the conceit by which the mind imagines itself the sufficient cause of its own generation, begetting thoughts and works as if from itself, when the true cause is God. To circumcise is to cut away that self-conceit. In his more exoteric treatise on the special laws he adds the reasons a Greek-educated reader would find persuasive on the surface: that the practice guards against disease, that it serves the cleanliness fitting a priestly nation, that it aids fertility, each given with the care of a man defending a custom his neighbors found barbarous.

What is decisive in Philo is that he refuses to let the deeper reading dissolve the rite. He knew, in his own city, Jews who had so thoroughly allegorized the law that they felt free to stop keeping it — who reasoned that since circumcision signifies the excision of pleasure, the inward excision suffices and the bodily one may be dropped. Against these, whom he treats as men who have made themselves bodiless souls with no city and no neighbors, Philo insists that both must be kept: the hidden meaning pursued with care, and the visible observance guarded beyond reproach, because the law is like a living being whose plain commandments are its body and whose concealed sense is its soul, and a soul without a body does not walk in this world. He thus stands, on this question, at the exact opposite pole from the reading the Pauline letters would make a generation later out of the same materials: the same allegory of the heart, the same recognition that the mark points beyond itself — and from it, the conclusion that the mark must therefore be kept all the more carefully, not let go.

Khitan — the way of Abraham

In Islam circumcision (khitan) is widely practiced and held to belong to the way of Abraham, regarded as an act of cleanliness and of conformity to prophetic custom. It is not commanded in the Qur’an itself; its warrant comes from the example of the prophets and from the reported sayings of Muhammad, in particular a tradition that numbers circumcision among the acts of the fitra — the natural, God-given disposition of humankind — alongside other practices of bodily care, and another that has Abraham circumcising himself in old age. The grounding in Abraham knits Islamic practice to the same patriarchal command that founds the Jewish rite, but the legal weight assigned to it varies. Its standing among the schools of law is variously argued: some jurists hold it obligatory, a duty binding on every male; others count it a strongly recommended custom, the practice of the prophet rather than a flat command — the difference turning on how the absence of a Qur’anic injunction is weighed against the strength of the prophetic example. In neither case is it a covenant-sign in the precise Jewish sense; it is an act of purity and of belonging to the community of Abraham, performed without the eighth-day fixity of the brit milah and without its specific liturgy of covenant, though no less firmly a mark of the people who keep it.

Texts, translations, and the scholarship

The covenant command stands in the seventeenth chapter of Genesis, with the heart-language gathered across Deuteronomy and the prophets; the Pauline argument is set out most fully in the Epistle to the Romans, with shorter statements in the letters to the Philippians and Colossians and in the speech of Stephen in Acts. The Hellenistic-Jewish setting in which the rite was at once defended and allegorized is read above all through Philo, whose treatises On the Migration of Abraham and On the Special Laws contain his account of circumcision; the only complete public-domain English Philo is Charles Duke Yonge’s nineteenth-century rendering, the basis of nearly all open access to the corpus. The companion Hellenistic-Jewish literature, including the Maccabean books that record the rite’s place in the Antiochene persecution, is held in full in this library in R. H. Charles’s Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament.

• C. D. Yonge, trans., The Works of Philo Judaeus, 4 vols. (London: Bohn, 1854–55) — the only complete public-domain English Philo, containing On the Migration of Abraham (with the censure of the extreme allegorists who keep the meaning but drop the rite) and On the Special Laws (with the reasons for circumcision); the text is hosted in continuous form at https://www.earlychristianwritings.com/yonge/.
• R. H. Charles, ed., The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1913) — the foundational public-domain English apparatus for the Hellenistic-Jewish corpus, including the Maccabean martyrdom narratives; held in full at /library/apocrypha/charles-apot/.
• John M. G. Barclay, “Paul and Philo on Circumcision: Romans 2.25–9 in Social and Cultural Context,” New Testament Studies 44 (1998): 536–56 — the standard study setting the Pauline heart-circumcision argument directly beside Philo’s, showing how the two draw opposite conclusions from a shared allegory; https://doi.org/10.1017/S0028688500016738.
• Shaye J. D. Cohen, Why Aren’t Jewish Women Circumcised? Gender and Covenant in Judaism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005) — the leading scholarly treatment of the gendered logic of the covenant-sign and its reception; https://www.ucpress.edu/books/why-arent-jewish-women-circumcised/hardcover.
• Andreas Blaschke, Beschneidung: Zeugnisse der Bibel und verwandter Texte (Tübingen: Francke, 1998) — the comprehensive collection and analysis of the biblical and cognate evidence for circumcision; cataloged at https://www.worldcat.org/title/39605200.
• Maren R. Niehoff, Philo of Alexandria: An Intellectual Biography (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018) — the current standard life of Philo, situating his defense of the literal law against the Alexandrian allegorists within his wider project; reviewed at https://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2018/2018.05.36/.

Across these traditions the rite keeps its double character: an irreversible mark on the body, and a sustained metaphor for what such a mark was supposed to mean. The same word names a thing done with a knife and a thing done to the will, and the distance between them is where most of the argument has lived.

→ In the library: The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament (Charles, 1913)

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