Why Circumcise Infants? Maimonides, Tradition, and the Right to Choose | A Segment from Episode 147, Lech Lecha
If circumcision is so important, why not wait until the person whose body is at the center of the ceremony can choose it for himself?
Hello, friends. Daniel Adar here. In this segment from episode 147 of Beliefs & Consequences, devoted to Parashat Lech Lecha, we examine infant circumcision. We look beyond the celebratory explanations familiar from the ceremony to the sources, beliefs, and reasons offered across generations. Some are less familiar. Some may surprise even those convinced they have already heard everything.
Our journey begins with the idea that the body is born defective and requires correction. It passes through angels and protective amulets, reaches the Victorian campaign against masturbation, and concludes with Maimonides’ arguments concerning sexuality, the age of circumcision, and parental compassion. We encounter different, sometimes conflicting explanations for the same action performed on a child’s body.
A Defective Body, or a Body to Leave as It Was Born?
In the traditions I discuss, the foreskin is presented as a deficiency, while circumcision brings bodily perfection. “Arel” means someone who is uncircumcised. “Mahul” means someone circumcised, or someone described in tradition as having been born without a foreskin. A physical distinction acquires religious and moral significance.
Midrashic traditions describe biblical figures as having been born circumcised. These accounts attribute perfection to them from birth: others require a corrective act, while these individuals arrive already possessing the desired condition. “Midrash” is interpretive literature that develops the biblical text, explores it, and adds traditions. It is distinct from what the biblical verse itself says.
Here we should pause: if God created the body, how did one particular part become a mistake we must correct? A theological answer concerns God, divine intentions, and the relationship between God and humanity. But familiarity with a ceremony does not make the question disappear. Habit may explain why we do not ask. It cannot answer for us.
Angels Too? What the Book of Jubilees Says
The Book of Jubilees includes a tradition that the angels of the presence and the angels of holiness were created circumcised. Within that framework, circumcision brings the human body closer to a heavenly model. A bodily act becomes an expression of belonging to a divine order. sefaria.org
Jubilees is an ancient Jewish work outside the Jewish biblical collection. When I refer to an “external book,” I mean a work outside that canon. A “canon” is the collection of writings accepted as authoritative sacred texts within a particular tradition. Being outside it does not make a book unimportant for understanding the culture in which it was written.
Quite the opposite. Such traditions reveal the breadth of the intellectual world. Explanations that sound obvious today existed alongside images and beliefs many people no longer recognize. Understanding a ceremony sometimes requires reading the books that were not left on the central shelf.
Amulets, Monsters, and the Belief That Circumcision Saves
I then refer viewers to Dr. Yigal Bin-Nun’s lecture, “Why Do We Circumcise Our Sons?”, and its discussion of finds from Arslan Tash. The segment presents amulets depicting creatures swallowing a human being. An “amulet” is an object believed to provide protection or influence events.
The interpretation presented connects those images with a belief that circumcision protects against danger. This is an “apotropaic” explanation: a scholarly term describing an action, object, or ritual intended to ward off evil. The word may sound complicated. The idea is simple: doing something to prevent a threatening power from harming us.
We should understand what this comparison offers. It proposes a cultural context and an interpretation of objects and traditions. It does not turn every suggested connection into proof that we have located the single moment when the practice was invented. Investigating origins means explaining development through evidence, rather than replacing one unquestionable story with another.
Zipporah and the “Bridegroom of Blood”: A Short Story with Large Questions
Exodus 4 contains the enigmatic account of an encounter at a lodging place, a threat of death, Zipporah cutting off her son’s foreskin, and the threat withdrawing. Careful reading matters particularly here. The passage is short, its pronouns are ambiguous, and its details are not explained as a modern reader might wish.
In the segment, I present the reading that Moses is endangered, alongside traditional expansions describing angels or creatures swallowing him. The biblical wording says that Zipporah circumcises her son. The swallowing narratives and explanations of the threatening figure belong to interpretive layers that must be distinguished from the verses.
What interests me is the combination of blood, circumcision, and rescue. The connection drawn with Passover blood also places the act within a world of danger and protection. “Bridegroom of blood” is Zipporah’s expression in the story, and its precise meaning is disputed. Ambiguity gives us a reason to investigate, rather than pretend everything is clear.
When Medicine Adopted the Fear of Sexuality
We then move to the Anglophone world, meaning the English-speaking world. In the segment, I describe how promoting circumcision during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries became connected with fears about masturbation and attempts to restrain sexuality. “Victorian” refers to Queen Victoria’s period in Britain and, in this context, a moral discourse emphasizing sexual restraint and supervision.
The physician mentioned is Lewis Sayre, within the history of attempts to attribute a wide range of therapeutic powers to circumcision. The point is not that every doctor shared one motive, or that the practice’s spread has a single explanation. Medical language can also carry the moral assumptions and anxieties of its period.
An intervention performed historically in medicine’s name is not automatically grounded in today’s medical knowledge. Equally, a map showing a practice’s prevalence cannot, by itself, establish its medical effectiveness or ineffectiveness. It can invite questions about how religion, institutions, norms, and habits shape what people consider “natural” to do.
Maimonides: Correcting the Body, or Restraining Desire?
This brings us to The Guide for the Perplexed, Part III, Chapter 49. Maimonides, Rabbi Moses ben Maimon, includes restraining sexual desire among his explanations for circumcision. He also rejects the idea that nature produced a deficient body requiring external completion. I emphasize the contrast between that explanation and the traditions of bodily perfection introduced earlier.
This disagreement deserves attention. The same act receives one explanation involving physical completion and another involving bodily alteration to restrain behavior. Saying “this is how tradition explains it” is therefore insufficient. Which tradition? Which author? In which period? What exactly does he say?
Maimonides’ statements about sexual effects appear here as his historical understanding and explanation of the commandment. They do not replace contemporary medical research. We can examine his moral reasoning without making a twelfth-century physician the final authority on human bodies today.
Why While He Is Still an Infant?
For me, the most unsettling section concerns timing. We read Maimonides’ reasons for circumcision in early childhood: the possibility that the child might refuse when older, the infant’s lack of conscious anticipation, and the concern that parental compassion and attachment might make the commandment harder to carry out if parents waited. The Sefaria Library
These arguments concern ensuring that the act takes place. They require us to ask what happens when choice and compassion are described as obstacles to get ahead of. Is a person’s possible future refusal concerning his own body a problem we should solve in advance? Or is it something we should allow?
“Bodily autonomy” means a person’s ability to make decisions about their body. “Informed consent” means agreement based on understanding an action and its implications. An infant cannot provide it. Parents make many decisions for their children, so the moral question cannot be settled in one sentence. But when the motivation is religious or cultural belonging, the possibility that the child might choose differently when older deserves serious consideration.
Whose Belief, Whose Body?
This discussion does not require assuming that parents do not love their children. It requires examining what love, responsibility, and tradition permit us to do. People can act with good intentions and still owe a moral account of their decisions.
In the segment, I distinguish an intervention required for a particular medical problem from circumcision performed for traditional reasons. These raise different questions. Our discussion concerns religious and cultural justifications, and the choice of the person who will carry the consequences in his body.
Watch this segment from episode 147, “Parashat Lech Lecha,” and read the sources alongside the discussion. Tell us in the comments: Which explanation surprised you, and does it change how you think about the ceremony? Subscribe, share with friends willing to have a thoughtful discussion, and explore further content on our website. The question concerns more than why our ancestors did it. It concerns what justifies our decisions today.
Links and References Discussed in the Segment
Genesis 17: Circumcision as a covenantal sign.
The Guide for the Perplexed, Part III, Chapter 49: Reasons for circumcision and its timing.
The Book of Jubilees, chapter 15: Circumcision and the angelic model.
Exodus 4:24–26: Zipporah and the bridegroom of blood.
Rashi on Exodus 4:24 and 4:25: Interpretations of the danger and circumcision.
Nedarim 32a: The tradition concerning Af, Hemah, and Moses.
Dr. Yigal Bin-Nun: “Why Do We Circumcise Our Sons?”: The lecture recommended in the segment, discussing the practice’s origins.
Beliefs & Consequences: Further episodes and related content.