A Little Off the Top Please!

The procedure known as circumcision goes way back. Many people attribute the history of the circumcision back to an agreement between God and Father Abraham, the patriarch of the Jewish people. There are some however who would argue that there were African communities performing circumcisions long before Abraham. My goal isn't to debate or establish that fact one way or the other. My focus is merely on the procedure as it originated with Abraham, and more specifically why in the world would God even suggest such a thing.

As a child growing up in a Christian home, I often heard about and read about Abraham, and his relationship with God. I always found the stories of how his faith was tested to be quite interesting. But even then the one thing that never sat quite right with me was the whole circumcision thing. Most of the time, my questioning of the matter would produce answers like He's God He can do whatever He wants, but even as a kid that was kind of hard to swallow as everything else God did seemed to have an order or a reasoning behind it, even though most of the time the people involved didn't seem to understand or even agree with His reasoning.

As time went on I just stopped asking and filed my questions away, that is until my own son was born, and it was time for him to pay a visit to the little guillotine himself. Once again I found myself wondering about God's original intentions for the supposedly sacred nip tuck. was it like some suggest, to discourage sexual activity by removing the skin and thereby limiting a brothers sexual pleasure? Maybe it was like other suggest , to purify men who were dirty little sex driven deviants. (Maybe it was the equivalent of a heavenly recall, in an attempt to correct an unsightly design flaw.) None of the reasons or suggestions I heard made sense to me. After a little bit of digging and a stepping outside of my "western way" of thinking, I began to see that maybe it wasn't as weird as it seemed and that there indeed some common sense reasoning behind it.