Sorry for a posting yet another circumcision question. This one’s not a let’s-all-debate-ethics thing, though. What I want to know is what precisely is the socio-anthropological basis for circumcision? I mean, if all you want to do is establish your own religious identity, why not just pierce your ear, or cut off a finger or toe, or braid your hair, or tattoo yourself, or something? What made some early shaman or priest or prophet or seer or whatever come up with the idea of removing one’s foreskin? There are plenty of ways to differentiate your tribe from others, why such a painful and unappealing method? I can’t believe that nomadic tribespeople knew about the hygenic properties of circumcision (which I freely admit are arguable–no flames please!). And when exactly was the “operation” first recorded? How long have we been doing this?
I doin’t know when circumcision was first performed – foreskins don’t fossilize well. It’s recorded in the Bible several times. (Moses gets circumcised by Zipporah to save him from an attack by God in Exodus, IIRC. There are, I think, other accounts of “first circumcisions”.) The Egyptians might have done it, too.
As for why people did it, there are several theories:
1.) It’s “cleaner”. No smegma, they say.
2.) it lets you sacrifice something painful but not threatening.
3.) It looks more aesthetically pleasing
I’m not sure I’d buy any of these.
Well, the sexual organs have always been powerfully associated with sacredness, so something very important like tribal/religious identity commonly involved them. Fertility, sexual pleasure and all that sort of really, really important stuff. Women bleed from their sexual organs to mark the beginning of their fertility and their womanhood. It makes a sort of sense that men should have to bleed from their sexual organs to truly be a man. It’s all menstruation envy, I tell ya. 
are you saying that tatooing, ear piercing and other various bodily alternations are less painful and unappealing than circumcision? That is an exceedingly culturally laden statement you’ve made. For example, the tribe (I’m sorry, I don’t remember wher) where the women stretch their necks with increasing stacks of disks until their heads cannot be supported without them. Or the group (amazonian, I want to say?) that apply lip disks thatat stretch their lips several inches. Or the Mayan practice of flattening babies’ heads with boards so that they would be smooth and sloping instead of round. Or any number of things which (to me) sound way worse than circumcision.
CalMeacham:
Actually, the Zipporah incident involved her circumcising hers and Moses’s second son, Eleazar.
And the first recorded circumcision in the Bible is that of Abraham.
Joseph Campbell says it’s all about the father’s desire to castrate his son.
No, it doesn’t make much sense to me either.
But if you’re interested, it’s in the “Primitive Religion” volume of the Masks of God series, which includes lots of other icky genital mutilations, too.
The “bridegroom of blood” incident in the Bible is particularly confusing. It reads something like this:
At a lodging place on the way, YHWH met him [could be Moses, Gershom, or Eleazar] and was about to kill him. But Zipporah took a flint knife, cut off her son’s [again, doesn’t specify which son] foreskin and touched his [still unclear!] feet [often used as an euphemism for the genitals] with it.
So we can’t say for certain who was circumcised, who YHWH wanted to kill, and who got the foreskin touched where!
There’s an interesting interpretation of this passage found in Jonathan Kirsh’s Moses: A Life. Yes, it is tied to the original question.
The hypothesis is that YHWH was originally a tribal deity who would take delight in having the “right of the first night” (if you will) with young virgin brides. This of course drew blood. In order to appease this God in other ways, the local tribes took to circumcising their teenage men. The blood drawn from the husband’s genitals was a substitute for that of his soon-to-be-wife. This explains the propensity for teenage circumcision among certain local tribes, such as the Midianites and Egyptians. Apparently, it somehow migrated down to 8 day old babies among the Israelites.
Sound crazy? Yup. But the “Midianite Hypothesis” actually has some currency among historians of that era.