Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 5.djvu/804

Rh 7JO CIRCUMCISION the eighth day after the child s birth. Is this account, we may ask, based on a historical tradition 1 If so, the circumcision of the Israelites is entirely unconnected with that of other nations unless indeed other nations have borrowed theirs from the Israelites. This has actually been maintained in the case of the Egyptians by Arch deacon Hard vicke, but the theory is not only improbable in itself, considering the imitative character of the Israelites, and their low reputation in Egypt (Gen. xlvi. 34), but contrary to the evidence of the Egyptian monuments (see below). If, as has been supposed by some, the docu ment to which Gen. xvii. belongs is of post-captivity origin, this would put it out of court as a witness to the popular tradition of the Hebrews. But there is another narrative, apparently of a more archaic com plexion, which leads to a directly opposite historical result. We read in Exod. iv. 25, 26, that when Moses was returning from Midian to Egypt, he was in danger of his life, owing to the neglect of the rite of circumcision in his family. &quot; And Zipporah,&quot; his Midianitish wife, &quot; took a sharp stone, and cut off the foreskin of her son, and cast it at his feet, and said, Surely a khathan (Auth. Vers., husband ) of blood art thou to me ; so he (sc,, the offended deity) desisted from him. At that time she said, A khathan of blood, with reference to the circumcision.&quot; The meaning of this story can still be discerned. KhatJwm, or khatan, meant originally not &quot; husband &quot; (as Auth. Vers. of Exodus), nor &quot; son-in-law &quot; (as in ordinary Arabic), but &quot; a newly-admitted member of the family.&quot; This appears from the sense of Arab, khatana, &quot; to provide a wedding-feast, 1 and khatana, &quot; to give or receive a daughter in marriage. &quot; So that in the sense of the old Hebrew tra dition, &quot;a khathan of blood&quot; meant &quot;one who has become a khathan, not by marriage, but by circumcision,&quot; a mean ing which is still further confirmed by the derived sense of Arab, khatana &quot; to circumcise,&quot; circumcision being performed in Arabia at the age of puberty. To sum up : an Arabian woman plays the chief part in the story, and her words are only explicable from the Arabic ; it is also far from im probable that Yahweh (or Jehovah) was himself first made known to the Jews in Arabia (comp. Judg. v. 4, Hab. iii. 3) ; putting all which together, we obtain a strong case for the hypothesis of the Arabian origin of Jewish cir cumcision. The -third narrative is Josh. v. 2-9, where Joshua is said to have circumcised the children of Israel a second time with &quot; knives of stone,&quot; and to have thus &quot; rolled away the reproach of Egypt from off them.&quot; It is not unnatural that this should have been used by some to confirm the view of an Egyptian origin of circumcision, among others by Dr Ebers, who refers to the additional words in the Septuagint, Josh. xsiv. 31, &quot; There they buried with him the stone knives with which he had circumcised the children of Israel in Gilgal.&quot; But, first, with regard to this singular statement of the Alexandrine version, it must henceforth be abandoned by all scholars. It is simply an unscientific attempt to account for the existence near Joshua s supposed tomb of flint instruments, such as those discovered by M. Guerin on this very site. It need hardly be added that the fliufc instruments discovered by the French savant were really pre-historic ; they consist not only of knives, but of saws, which would hardly have been available for the purpose ascribed to Joshua (see Burton and Drake s Unexplored Syria, ii. 295-300). And, secondly, Bishop Colenso has shown some reason for the suspicion that verses 2 to 8 (not verse 9) are later additions to the narrative, in which case the &quot; reproach of Egypt&quot; means, not the state of uncircumci- sion, but the contempt of the Egyptians so forcibly expressed in Exod. xxxii. 12, Num. xiv. 13-16. As for the &quot;knives of stone &quot; (comp. Josh. xxiv. 31, Sept.), on which Ebers has laid some stress, such implements are not distinctively Egyptian, if they were even employed at all by the Egyp tians for the purpose of circumcision. It is true that Herodotus (ii. 104, comp. Diod. Sic., i. 28) asserts the Egyptian origin of circumcision to have been admitted in Palestine, but he is probably only right so far as the Phoenicians or Canaanites are concerned. II. We may now proceed to consider circumcision from an ethnographical point of view. It was not a specially Semitic rite, being only known to the southern and western Semites, who probably derived it directly or indirectly from the Egyptians, if not from some entirely non-Semitic source. Though not referred to in the Koran, it was a primitive Arabian custom to circumcise youths at their entrance on puberty (i.e., between their tenth and fifteenth year), as appears not only from Gen. xvii. 25, Jos. Antiq., i. 12, 2, but from the express statement of Ibn-al-Athir (quoted by Pococke, Specimen Hist. Arafaim, p. 319), which is confirmed by a remarkable passage in the life of the old Arabian poet Dhu-1-isba (Zeitschr. f. d. Kunde des Morgenlandes, iii. 230). From Arabia it was carried by the preachers of Islam to Persia, India, and Turkey ; from Arabia, too, as we have seen, it probably came in remote times to the Israelites. The circumcision of the Phoenicians or Canaanites has been disputed, but is attested by Herodotus (ii. 104), and is confirmed by the story in Gen. xxxiv., as also by the fact that the term of contempt, &quot; the uncircumcised,&quot; is reserved in the Old Testament for the Philistines. The rite seems, however, to have fallen into disuse in later times in Phoenicia aa well as in Egypt (Dr Ebers refers to the uncircumcised figures on the stele of Pianchi, comp. also Herod. I.e., Jos. Antiq., viii. 10, 3, Contr. Ap. i. 22, and perhaps Ezek. xxxii. 24, 30), which may partly account for its being afterwards regarded as distinctive of the Jews. The Egyptians, too, were circumcised, arid that prior to the immigration of the Hebrews (Wilkinson), as appears from the representations on the very earliest monuments. The most striking of these is the scene on a bas-relief discovered in the temple of Chunsu at Karnak, a drawing of which is given by M. Chabas and Dr Ebers. The subjects of the operation are apparently the two children of Barneses II. , the founder of the temple. Their age, says Dr Ebers, must be between six and ten, which agrees with the present custom in Egypt, where, as Mr Lane tells us, circumcision is generally performed in the fifth or sixth year, though often postponed by peasants to the twelfth, thirteenth, or even fourteenth year (Modern Egyptians, i. 71). It has often been asserted that only the priests underwent the operation, but there is no earlier evidence for this than that of Origen (ed. Lommatzsch, iv. 138), in whose time it is quite possible that the Egyptians, like the later Jews, sought to evade a peculiarity which exposed them to ridicule and contempt. But the rite of circumcision is known among nations which cannot be suspected of communication with Egypt. Similar causes produce similar effects all the world over. It was in use in some form among the ancient civilized peoples of Central America, though this is better attested of the Nahua branch (including the Aztecs) than of the Maya (Bancroft, Native Races, vol. iii.). It is still kept up among the Teamas and Manaos on the Amazon ; also among three distinct races in the South Seas, among most of the tribes of Australia, among the Papuans, the New Caledonians, and the inhabitants of the New Hebrides. If, is widely spread in Africa, especially among the Kaffir tribes. Among the Bechuanas the boys who are circum cised together form a sort of society, for which among other reasons, Waitz conjectures that the Bechuanas com municated the rite to the other Kaffirs. Prichard (Physical