CIRCUMCISION AND HUMAN SACRIFICE

 

God further said to Abraham, you, you and your offspring to come through the ages shall keep my covenant. Such shall be the covenant between Me and you and your offspring to follow which you shall keep: every male among you shall be circumcised. Thus shall My covenant be marked in your flesh as an everlasting pact. And if any male shall fail to circumcise the flesh of his foreskin, that person shall be cut off from his kin; he has broken My covenant.
The man name Abram which translates to (“The Father [or God] Is Exalted”), who is later named Abraham (“The Father of Many Nations”), was a native of Ur in Mesopotamia, was called by God (Yahweh) to leave his own country and people and journey to an undesignated land, where he will become the founder of a new nation.
—Genesis 17:9-10, 13-14

Human Sacrifice and Circumcision, Extract from Biblical Archaeology Review

“Why King Mesha of Moab Sacrificed His Oldest Son,” human sacrifice when siege or pestilence threatened to exterminate a city. 
Possibly after sacrificing all and failing to pacify the enemy, at the eleventh hour Mesha wisely sacrificed his first born and only son, this to save himself his people and the city. The act demonstrates that he has accepted that he has no future, at the least not for a generation or so.to give up something that is valuable to you in order to help another person: forfeited the future, the sovereignty of the kingdom "Then he took his eldest son who should have reigned in his stead, and offered him as a burnt offering upon the wall. And there was great indignation against Israel. And they departed from him, and returned to their own land."

The text attributed to the Phoenician priest Sanchuniathon that author Baruch Margalit cites makes clear that the practice of circumcision is directly related to this rite of human sacrifice. We learn there that once, when destruction threatened his city, the god El offered his only son as a sacrifice to his father, the god Heaven; he also circumcised himself and ordered his followers to do the same. Circumcision is thus a substitute for human sacrifice, an offering of a part of the body in place of the whole. In Canaanite religion, it served as a reminder to El of the offering of his own son that he himself had performed.

In the Bible, circumcision is described as a “sign” of the covenant between Israel and its God. Nowhere, however, is a reason given for the choice of this particular rite as such a sign. The Canaanite material gives us the rationale for this practice.

Israel took over from the Canaanites the conviction that, by offering this part of the body in place of the whole, the life of the individual, and of the entire community, would be preserved.

Roy A. Rosenberg

New York, New York

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