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Letter to Toronto Globe and Mail, December 9, 2000. Dr. Jesin has a personal website, illustrated with a smiling infant (over the words “The Jesin Circumcision Clinic”), a physicians’ caduceus, and “mazel tov!” in Hebrew script: http://drjesin.com/indexaj.html (March 4, 2001).
The Talmud (the foremost text of rabbinic commentary, completed around 500 CE) includes a discussion of whether the “blood of the covenant” must be made to flow from infants born without foreskins and converts who were circumcised earlier: B. T. Yeb. 71a. Again, in Genesis Rabbah (a book of commentary on Genesis, composed at about the same time), several rabbis are cited in a discussion of the same question: Gen. R. 46.12, in Freedman H, Simon M, editors and translators. Midrash Rabbah: Genesis. London: Soncino Press; 1939. pp. 396-7. The essential references on circumcision and bloodshed are Hoffman LA. Covenant of Blood: Circumcision and Gender in Rabbinic Judaism. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press; 1996; and Cohen SJD. A brief history of Jewish circumcision blood. In Mark EW, editor. The Covenant of Circumcision: New Perspectives on an Ancient Jewish Rite. Hanover and London: Brandeis University Press; 2003. pp. 30-42. Cohen concludes that circumcision is now conceived to be blood sacrifice. Why, he asks, did circumcision blood become significant when and where it did? And why was circumcision not interpreted as sacrifice until then? This article may be read as an attempt to answer these questions, and to build on the pioneering research of both authors.
For more detail on these and other biblical texts discussed in this article, see Glick LB. Marked in Your Flesh: Circumcision from Ancient Judea to Modern America. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press; 2005. pp. 13-27.
An instructive and readable reference on this complex topic is Friedman RE. Who Wrote the Bible? New York: Summit Books; 1987.
Ex. 24:3-8; JPS Hebrew-English Tanakh. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society; 1999 (hereafter JPS). pp. 164-5; bracketed phrase is the literal meaning, cited in a note to the translation.
Rogerson JW. Sacrifice in the Old Testament: problems of method and approach. In: Bourdillon MFC, Fortes M, editors. Sacrifice. London: Academic Press; 1980. pp. 45-59. [here, p. 59.] E. W. Nicholson also argues that the blood rite served not to ratify the covenant but for “consecration and purification.” Nicholson EW. Exodus and Sinai in History and Tradition. Oxford: Basil Blackwell; 1973. pp. 72-4. As I’ve just suggested, these attributes might be better interpreted as complementary.
JPS, p. 1395. This text is sometimes cited in prayers accompanying the circumcision rite.
JPS, p. 211; “sprinkle of the blood” sic.
Lev. 17:10-11; JPS, p. 248. An essential feature of shechitah, ritual slaughter to produce kosher meat, is that the animal must be exsanguinated. Orthodox Jews avoid blood consumption so strictly that even kosher meat must be salted and soaked to remove all traces of blood. In addition, an animal that proves on examination to have been infected or otherwise defective is unacceptable ⎯ just as was true for temple sacrifices. The Bible says nothing specific about ritual slaughter, aside from a single ambiguous passage in Deuteronomy: “you may slaughter any of the cattle or sheep that the Lord gives you, as I have instructed you … But make sure that you do not partake of the blood, for the blood is the life, and you must not consume the life with the flesh” (Deut. 12:21, 23; JPS, p. 403). Julian Morgenstern notes that “early Semites,” hunters and pastoralists, believed that the number of animals in each species was “definitely limited.” To have consumed the blood would have meant consuming the soul, hence reducing the number of individuals in the species. This, he says, explains the biblical prohibition on blood consumption: “For the soul and the life were one; the soul was in the blood.” Morgenstern J. The bones of the paschal lamb. J Amer Oriental Soc 1916;36:146-53. [here, p. 151.]
Readers who feel that this statement requires proof might begin with Finkelstein I, Silberman NA. The Bible Unearthed. New York: Free Press; 2001. pp. 27-47.
On circumcision among Semitic peoples as protection from evil spirits or redemption from child sacrifice, see Morgenstern J. Rites of Birth, Marriage, Death, and Kindred Occasions among the Semites. Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College and Chicago: Quadrangle Books; 1966. Chapter ix. For additional references on child sacrifice, see note 41 below.
I discuss the relation between Genesis 17 and Genesis 15 in Glick LB. Marked in Your Flesh: Circumcision from Ancient Judea to Modern America. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press; 2005. pp. 16-17.
Blood does play a role in a cryptic circumcision narrative in Exodus. Moses’s wife Zipporah circumcises their son to avert Yahweh’s anger against Moses, touches the latter’s genitals with the bloodied foreskin, and declares, “You are truly a bridegroom of blood to me!” (Ex. 5:24-26). For analysis of this tale, see Eilberg-Schwartz H. God’s Phallus. Boston: Beacon Press; 1994. pp. 158-61, and Glick NS. Zipporah and the bridegroom of blood: searching for the antecedents of Jewish circumcision. In this volume.
Detailed discussion of this topic would be well beyond the scope of this paper and my competence. For an introduction, see Cohen SJD. From the Maccabees to the Mishnah. Philadelphia: Westminster Press; 1987. Chapter 7.
The best examples are found in the Orthodox liturgy for Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement) in the section called Avodah, “Service,” which recounts the service of the high priest on that day. Also, the passages read from the Torah that day, from Leviticus 16 and Numbers 29, deal mainly with temple sacrifices. See, e.g., Adler H, editor.
Service of the Synagogue: Day of Atonement. New York: Ktav; n.d. (ca. 1940). Part II. pp. 159-168, 110-3. Similarly, as part of the reading of the Torah on Rosh Hashanah, the New Year celebration, another passage is recited from Numbers 29, describing the sacrifice designated for that occasion. See, e.g., Davis A, Adler HM, editors. Synagogue Service for New Year. New York: Hebrew Publishing Company; 1959. pp. 120, 219. 16Ex. 12:7, 12-13, 23-27; JPS, pp. 135-7.
These were established customs among Middle Eastern peoples. See the ethnographic observations recorded more than a century ago by the missionary-scholar Samuel Ives Curtiss: Curtiss SI. Primitive Semitic Religion To-day. Chicago and New York: Fleming H. Revell; 1902. chapters 15-17. Blood, he remarked, “is the all-important thing in sacrifice,” and “primitive sacrifice consists wholly in the shedding of blood.” pp. 227, 230.
According to II Chronicles 30, centralized passover sacrifice at the first Jerusalem temple was initiated by Hezekiah, king of Judah in the late eighth century BCE. His son Manasseh permitted reassertion of localized cults. According to II Kings 19-23, Josiah, a king of Judah in the seventh century, again abolished localized cults, killed their priests, centralized worship in Jerusalem, and ordered that the passover sacrifice be conducted only there.
Baruch Bokser explains how the ceremonial meal replaced the paschal sacrifice after the disappearance of the Temple: Bokser BM. The Origins of the Seder: The Passover Rite and Early Rabbinic Judaism. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press; 1984. On circumcision blood as replacement for paschal blood, see pp. 96-9.
Ex. 12:43-48; JPS, pp. 138-9.
21Although the word ot is usually translated as “sign,” Howard Eilberg-Schwartz explains why it is more accurately translated as “symbol” when used with reference to circumcision and the blood of the paschal lamb: Eilberg-Schwartz H. The Savage in Judaism: An Anthropology of Israelite Religion and Ancient Judaism. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press; 1990. pp. 146-7. Michael Fox argues that the lamb’s blood served as a “cognition sign,” or an “identity sign,” affecting “God’s consciousness, not man’s” ⎯ that is, reminding the Lord of his obligation to respect the covenantal relationship by sparing the Israelite children from destruction: Fox MV. The sign of the covenant. Revue Biblique 1974;81:557-96. [here, 574-5.]
22Ezek. 16:5-8; JPS, p. 1181; brackets in original. I discuss this passage in more detail in Glick LB. ‘Something less than joyful’: Jewish Americans and the circumcision dilemma. In: Denniston GC, Hodges FM, Milos MF, editors. Flesh and Blood: Perspectives on the Problem of Circumcision in Contemporary Society. New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers; 2004. pp. 143-69. [here, pp. 154-6.]
23Hoffman LA. Covenant of Blood: Circumcision and Gender in Rabbinic Judaism. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press; 1996. pp. 106-7. Bokser BM. The Origins of the Seder: The Passover Rite and Early Rabbinic Judaism. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press; 1984. pp. 96-7.
Friedlander G, editor and translator. Pirkê de Rabbi Eliezer. New York: Benjamin Blom; 1971. pp. 210-1; punctuation sic; editor’s parentheses for (twofold); my brackets. In the first quoted sentence, I followed the editor’s note indicating that the two bloods were both mentioned in the original editions, and I used “them” where he has (it) followed by a note indicating that the original editions used the plural pronoun. Interestingly, the later editions apparently cited only the blood of circumcision in the first sentence, but of course cited both kinds of blood thereafter. See the discussion of this text in Hoffman LA. Covenant of Blood: Circumcision and Gender in Rabbinic Judaism. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press; 1996. pp. 100-3. Hoffman defines the essential message: “[T]he covenant from Abraham on saves; it did so in Egypt and will do so again at the end of days. But the covenant is a covenant of blood.” [here, p. 103; his emphasis.]
The connection was obviously recognized in Denniston GC, Hodges FM, Milos MF, editors. Flesh and Blood: Perspectives on the Problem of Circumcision in Contemporary Society. New York: Academic/Plenum Publishers; 2004.
JPS, p. 29.
JPS, p. 241; a note explains that basar literally means “flesh.” Howard Eilberg-Schwartz points out that, through obvious association, basar also signifies kinship-specifically patrilineal descent. Eilberg-Schwartz H. The Savage in Judaism: An Anthropology of Israelite Religion and Ancient Judaism. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press; 1990. pp. 170-1.
Ezek. 16:26, 23:20; JPS, pp. 1182, 1203. In the first passage the translators say “lustful Egyptians,” but in a note they explain that the phrase they translated as “lustful” (big basar) literally means “big of phallus.” The word in the second passage translated as “organ,” zirmat, may mean something like “issue” or “flow”; a note in the translation says that the meaning is uncertain.
Lev. R. 25.7; Freedman H and Simon M, editors. Midrash Rabbah: Leviticus. London: Soncino; 1939. p. 319. Note that the rabbis appear to have realized that circumcision diminishes the size of the penis.
For historical analysis of the development of the circumcision liturgy, see Hoffman LA. Covenant of Blood: Circumcision and Gender in Rabbinic Judaism. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press; 1996. Chapters 3-5 and 11.
Sephardic Jews originated in Spain, where they lived among Muslims until the Christian “reconquest”; they dispersed widely after being expelled from Spain and Portugal in the late fifteenth century. Ashkenazic Jews lived in much of the rest of Europe from the early medieval period onward.
Asher A, translator and editor. The Jewish Rite of Circumcision. London: Philip Valentine; 1873. pp. vii-ix. Asher translates the passage beginning “May the blood of the Covenant” only once, but it is repeated at the end of the Hebrew text.
Hoffman LA. Covenant of Blood: Circumcision and Gender in Rabbinic Judaism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; 1996. p. 68.
Birnbaum P, translator and editor. Daily Prayer Book: Ha-Siddur Ha-Shalem. New York: Hebrew Publishing Company; 1977. p. 744.
Birnbaum P, translator and editor. Daily Prayer Book: Ha-Siddur Ha-Shalem. New York: Hebrew Publishing Company; 1977. pp. 747-8. The fourth verse, on the same page, is also worth noting: “May God bless him who removed the foreskin,/And did fulfill all that has been ordained./One who is faint-hearted must not perform/This service, which includes three essentials.” The “three essentials” are milah, severing and removing the foreskin; peri’ah, stripping away the mucosal lining and excising remaining tissue back to the corona; and metsitsah, sucking the bleeding penis, sometimes followed by spitting the blood into a cup of wine.
I discuss this text in detail in Glick LB. Marked in Your Flesh: Circumcision from Ancient Judea to Modern America. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press; 2005. pp. 218-20.
Krohn PJ, editor. Bris Milah: Circumcision ⎯ The Covenant of Abraham. Brooklyn, NY: Mesorah Publications; 1985. p. 117; brackets and punctuation sic. Hebrew text on p. 116.
Krohn PJ, editor. Bris Milah: Circumcision ⎯ The Covenant of Abraham. Brooklyn, NY: Mesorah Publications; 1985. pp. 131-32; my bracketed additions.
Krohn PJ, editor. Bris Milah: Circumcision ⎯ The Covenant of Abraham. Brooklyn, NY: Mesorah Publications; 1985, p. 137; my bracketed translation of hiqravtihu. Cf. Hoffman LA. Covenant of Blood: Circumcision and Gender in Rabbinic Judaism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; 1996. p. 72. In a note to this passage, Hoffman says, “The motif of sacrifice is itself a significant public meaning that I have chosen not to emphasize, because even though it does go back to rabbinic sources it becomes central only with the Zohar.” He cites two references: Vermes G. Circumcision and Exodus IV 24-26. In: Vermes G. Scripture and Tradition in Judaism. Leiden: E. J. Brill; 1973, pp. 178-92; and Wolfson ER, Circumcision and the divine name. Jewish Quarterly Rev 1987;78:77-112. Wolfson notes that the theme of sacrifice “is repeated frequently in the Zohar [the foremost kabbalistic text].” [here, p. 99]. But although the theme may have received increased attention from thirteenth-century Jewish mystics, I think it is significant that it already appears in much earlier “rabbinic sources.”
Krohn PJ, editor. Bris Milah: Circumcision ⎯ The Covenant of Abraham. Brooklyn, NY; Mesorah Publications; 1985. pp. 149, 151; his punctuation, italics, and brackets.
On the possibility (or probability) of child sacrifice in ancient Israel, see Levenson JD. The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son: The Transformation of Child Sacrifice in Judaism and Christianity. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press; 1993. esp. pp. 48-52 on circumcision; Day J. Molech: A God of Human Sacrifice in the Old Testament. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press; 1989; and Glick LB. Marked in Your Flesh: Circumcision from Ancient Judea to Modern America. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press; 2005. pp. 22-4. Julian Morgenstern says that, despite much scholarly opinion to the contrary, “the conclusion cannot be avoided that in Israel at one time the sacrifice of first-born children was a quite common, if not the regular, practice.” Since the deity owned children and might take all of them if angered, it made sense to offer the first-born son as a sacrifice to redeem the others. He concludes that “first-born children were, beyond all question, regularly sacrificed to the proper deity or spirit as the natural and proper taboo-sacrifice”: Morgenstern J. Rites of Birth, Marriage, Death, and Kindred Occasions among the Semites. Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press and Chicago: Quadrangle Books; 1966. pp. 63-4.
It is obvious, of course, that our subject has been not just genital blood but male genital blood. I have room here only to mention the abhorrence of female genital blood so characteristic of rabbinic thought. Whereas male genital blood is believed to consecrate and to effect salvation, female genital blood ⎯ menstrual and that shed at childbirth ⎯ is viewed as a pollutant. (Nansi S. Glick has observed that female blood is acceptable only in the display of bridal blood following a wedding night ⎯ also a traditional feature of many other Middle Eastern cultures, and yet another demonstration of male dominance.) See Hoffman LA. Covenant of Blood: Circumcision and Gender in Rabbinic Judaism. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press; 1996; Archer LJ. ‘In thy blood live’: gender and ritual in the Judaeo-Christian tradition. In: Joseph A, editor. Through the Devil’s Gateway: Women, Religion, and Taboo. London: SPCK; 1990. pp. 22-49; and Archer LJ. Bound by blood: circumcision and menstrual taboo in post-exilic Judaism. In: Soskice JM, editor. After Eve. London: Collins Marshal Pickering; 1990. pp. 38-61.
The Curse of Cain, Regina M. Schwartz’s perceptive study of the role of violence and ethnocentrism in the Hebrew Scriptures, begins with a chapter on covenants but (inexplicably) mentions circumcision only in passing. In one section of the chapter, called “Cutting Covenants,” Schwartz refers to “the cutting of human flesh at circumcision ⎯ the so-called sign of the covenant.” But, although she writes at some length about the cutting in Genesis 15, the original version of the myth of Abraham’s covenant (in which sacrificial animals are cut to seal the covenant), she says nothing about Genesis 17, the revised version that incorporates the circumcision myth (where it becomes foreskins that must be cut). Moreover, another section of the covenants chapter, entitled “The Blood of the Covenant,” discusses the blood-splashing episode at Sinai but still says nothing about circumcision. Schwartz RM. The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; 1997. pp. 21-32. 44Note the talmudic reference to blood that is “stored up,” and, in a passage from Maimonides, coming “from the distant places,” quoted in Shields YP. The making of metzitza ⎯- 1972. Tradition 1972;13:36-48. [here, pp. 37-8.] Howard Eilberg-Schwartz remarks that “circumcision cannot be interpreted in isolation from the symbolism of blood generally and female blood particularly. Circumcision is a postpartum ritual associated with the separation of a male child from his mother. When the child is removed from the impurity of his mother’s blood, he is brought into the covenant by the spilling of male blood. His blood is clean, unifying and symbolic of God’s covenant. His mother’s is filthy, socially disruptive and contaminating.” Circumcision, he continues, thus “marks the passage from the impurity of being born of women to the purity of life in a community of men.” Eilberg-Schwartz H. Why not the earlobe? Moment, February 1992;28-33. [here, pp. 32-3.] (These are the author’s interpretations of religious ideology, not statements of personal belief.)
Lawrence Hoffman discusses medieval texts describing men and adolescent boys dipping their hands and washing their faces and mouths with water into which has been dripped the blood of a newly circumcised infant: Hoffman LA. Covenant of Blood: Circumcision and Gender in Rabbinic Judaism. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press; 1996. pp. 104-5.
Hoffman LA. Covenant of Blood: Circumcision and Gender in Rabbinic Judaism. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press; 1996. p. 91. At Passover seders, as the assembled group recites the ten plagues, it is traditional practice to dip a finger into a cup of wine for each plague and drip it onto a plate. The recitation begins with the first plague: dam, “blood,” and concludes with makat b’khorot, “slaughter of the first-born [boys].”
On this question, the great twelfth-century physician-philosopher Maimonides observed that, in his opinion, circumcision is performed “to bring about a decrease in sexual intercourse and a weakening of the organ in question, so that this activity be diminished and the organ be in as quiet a state as possible. … For if at birth this member has been made to bleed and has had its covering taken away from it, it must indubitably be weakened”: Maimonides M. The Guide of the Perplexed. Pines S, translator and editor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; 1963. p. 609. I discuss the complete passage in detail in Glick LB. Marked in Your Flesh: Circumcision from Ancient Judea to Modern America. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press; 2005. pp. 64-6.
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Glick, L.B. (2006). The Life of the Flesh is in the Blood: The Meaning of Bloodshed in Ritual Circumcision. In: Denniston, G.C., Gallo, P.G., Hodges, F.M., Milos, M.F., Viviani, F. (eds) Bodily Integrity and the Politics of Circumcision. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-4916-3_2
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