Ouch!

Number 4 of 17 in the *Twilight Zone* series:

 by Farrell Till

"And it came to pass that Abraham said to God, `You want us to cut off our what!'" (1 Babinski 13:7).

Of all the strange ideas that found acceptance in the Twilight Zone of biblical times, perhaps none was any stranger than the notion that males had to have their foreskins cut off in order to please the petulant Yahweh. Actually, the rite of circumcision wasn't just a matter of pleasing Yahweh; it was either done or his wrath was incurred. When Yahweh gave the commandment that all eight-day-old males were to be circumcised, he made it clear that he meant business: "And the uncircumcised male child, who is not circumcised in the flesh of his foreskin, that person shall be cut off from his people; he has broken my covenant" (Gen. 17:14). What a clever way to put it! The uncircumcised person "shall be cut off from his people." Who says that Yahweh didn't have a sense of humor?

We might note that Yahweh was a little redundant too. The uncircumcised male child, who is not circumcised in the flesh of his foreskin--boy, Yahweh wanted to make sure he was understood on this point, didn't he? And no wonder. The expression "cut off from his people" didn't mean just banishment or exile, as some wrongly assume; it meant, as Arnold Schwarzenegger would say, "Hasta la vista, Baby!"

By comparing two passages in the book of Leviticus, we can determine that in the Hebrew society of Twilight-Zone times, "cut off" did mean "kill." Various sexual offenses are listed in chapter 18 with the warning that "whoever commits any of these abominations, the persons who commit them shall be cut off from among their people" (v:29). In its uniquely repetitious way, the Bible listed many of the same offenses again in chapter 20 with repeated warnings that those who do these things "shall surely be put to death" (vs. 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16), so the Hebrews obviously understood that being "cut off" from their people meant the death penalty.

We have to wonder why if Yahweh, the creator of heaven and earth, considered circumcised penises so important, he didn't just toss aside a little DNA on the sixth day and create Adam without a foreskin. However, if any of his chosen people ever had a thought like this, it never found its way into Yahweh's inspired word, because no one seemed to question this peculiar "covenant" requirement. Maybe some did question it but Yahweh just kept references to any smart-alecky dissenters out of his word to cover up a colossal mistake he had made. Who knows? Trying to figure out Twilight-Zone mentality is pretty much an exercise in futility.

The deadly seriousness with which Yahweh expected his chosen ones to observe the rite of circumcision is indicated in one of the weirdest stories in the Bible. Moses, who was returning to Egypt after the burning-bush scene where Yahweh instructed him to go rescue the chosen ones from bondage, had stopped for the night when.... Well, let's just let the inspired word of the inscrutable Yahweh tell us what happened: "On the journey, when Moses had halted for the night, Yahweh came to meet him and tried to kill him. At once Zipporah [Moses' Midianite wife] taking up a flint, cut off her son's foreskin [ouch!] and with it she touched the genitals of Moses. `Truly, you are a bridegroom of blood to me!' she said. And Yahweh let him live. It was then that she said, `bridegroom of blood' on account of the circumcision" (Exodus 4:24-26, Jerusalem Bible). I have to wonder why Zipporah took her anger out on Moses. After all, circumcision was all Yahweh's idea.

Only in the Twilight-Zone could one find a good sharp flint just lying handily nearby when it was needed. Maybe Novocaine also lay about on the ground like the manna of those times so that this poor kid didn't suffer too much trauma from Mama's abrupt flintstone surgery. If not, I don't imagine Mom and Pop got much sleep that night what with having to spend so much time walking the floor with a howling kid, and if ever any kid had a right to howl, this one certainly did. At any rate, the story illustrates how serious Yahweh was about circumcision. "When I say cut it off, I mean cut it off!"

Now we hear a lot these days about the degrading way that women were treated in biblical times--and justifiably so too--but I think that even the most radical feminist today would admit that women got a break from Yahweh when he decided to make circumcision a life and death matter. We can only wonder why with Yahweh being Yahweh he didn't dream up some comparably painful "covenant rite" for the other gender of his chosen people, but luckily for the female babies of those days, he didn't. I guess that even the creator of heaven and earth can have an off day. I have to wonder too how the idea for circumcision ever originated. Did some father in those Twilight-Zone days just study his newborn son's anatomy one day and say, "I wonder what he would look like if I cut off the end of his talliwhacker?" The unlikeliness that such a thought would ever have crossed a father's mind must prove that the Bible really is the inspired word of Yahweh, because only the mind of the inscrutable Yahweh could have dreamed up an idea like that.