Skip to main content

Genesis 17: Circumcision for All You Boys

Image
By

Image result for scissors

God said to Abram, “Down on your knees, boy!” so Abram dropped.  “I want to talk to you about something.  I got big things in mind.”

“What’s that, my Lord?” asked Abram.

“What I’m thinking is that I want to put you in charge of everyone in Canaan, so sooner or later you’re going to have to drive all the locals out, I guess.  I want to make you fertile and have a whopping number of children.  You’re going to be the ancestor of kings and nations and the like.  Sound good?”

“Sounds good so far, yes.”

“All I ask is that you get circumcised…”

“I knew there was a catch in there somewhere—“

“Quiet!  Now I’m asking you to get circumcised, and get all your friends to get circumcised, and that you make sure every male who’s eight days old get circumcised.  Otherwise, they’re out.  Get it?”

“Sure.  But do You really think the guys are going to go for this circumcision?”

“Tell them that I said to do it, and they’ll do anything.  You’d be surprised.  Also: you and the missus are going to have to change your names.  Abraham and Sarah just sounds better, don’t you think?”

“Anything You say, Lord.”

“Cool.  This Sarah’s going to have a son, too.  By you.  I’ll see to that.  Call him Isaac.”

“Why do You keep insisting on naming and renaming everyone?  With all due respect, Lord, this kind of sounds like a cult…”

“Watch it, Abram… I mean Abraham,” said God.  “Or I’ll ask for more than just the foreskins…”

So Abraham went out and told Ishmael and all the free men and all the slaves that they had to get circumcised, and they all did it, including the slaves who, up until that point, didn’t think life could get any worse.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How the Lemon was Invented

By
Lemons How do you make a lemon?  Silly question, isn’t it?  You just take the seeds out of one and plant them, and wait for the tree to come up, right?  That’s true, but it hasn’t always been that easy.  Lemons today are a widely cultivated citrus fruit, with a flavor used in cuisines of countries where no lemon tree would ever grow.  You might think that it was just a matter of ancient peoples finding the trees, enjoying their fruit and growing more of them, but that’s not true.  The lemon is a human invention that’s maybe only a few thousand years old. The first lemons came from East Asia, possibly southern China or Burma.  (These days, some prefer to refer to Burma as Myanmar .  I’ll try to stay out of that controversy here and stick to fruit.)  The exact date of the lemon’s first cultivation is not known, but scientists figure it’s been around for more than 4,000 years.  The lemon is a cross breed of several fruits.  One fruit is the bitter orange, best known in the west for
6 comments
Read more

Origins of the Word Hoser, eh?

By
Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas as cultural icons Bob and Doug McKenzie These days we often hear Canadians referred to as “Hosers”.  It’s a strange word, and it sounds a little insulting, but it’s sometimes used more with affection than malice.  Any such word is difficult to use correctly, especially if you don’t belong to the group the word describes.   I can’t say I feel comfortable throwing the word around, myself, but I can offer a little information about it that might shed some light on what it means. First off: is it an insult?  Yes… and no.   The word hoser can be used as an insult or as a term of endearment; the variation hosehead , is certainly an insult.  It’s a mild insult, meaning something like jerk or idiot or loser .  Its origin is unclear, and there are several debatable etymologies of the word.  One claims that it comes from the days before the zamboni was invented, when the losing team of an outdoor ice hockey game would have to hose down the rink in or
1 comment
Read more

The Whoopie Cap

By
What can you do with your father’s old hats?  If you were born after, say, 1955, the answer is probably “Not much.”  Men were still wearing fedoras in the 1970s and 1980s, but by 1990, fashion had turned to the point where unless you were Indiana Jones, the hat didn’t look right.  Some blame Jack Kennedy for starting it all, strutting around perfectly coiffed and bare-headed in the early 1960s.  In 1953, Harry Truman, a haberdasher by trade, stepped out of office, and just eight years later we had a president who didn’t care for hats?  The times, they were a-changin’. If you set the WABAC machine to the 1920s or 1930s (when Indiana Jones was supposed to have lived), you would see the fedora was still very much in style.  Men just didn’t leave the house without a hat of some kind, and for what remained of the middle class, the fedora was the topper of choice.  But like any other piece of clothing, hats wear out, too.  When that happened, you’d just throw it away.  Though if there were
Post a Comment
Read more