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Although the rite of circumcision here receives a new and special sanction, it had been appointed long before by God as the sign of His covenant with Abraham (Genesis 17:10-14). Nor was it, probably, even then a new thing. That the ancient Egyptians practised it is well known; so also did the Arabs and Phoenicians; in fact, the custom has been very extensively observed, not only by nations with whom the Israelites came in contact, but by others who have not had, in historic times, connection with any civilised peoples, as, e.g., men of the Congo and certain Indian tribes in South America. The fundamental idea connected with circumcision by most of the peoples who have practised it appears to have been physical purification; indeed, the Arabs call it by the name tatur, which has this precise meaning. And it deserves to be noticed that for this idea regarding circumcision there is so much reason in fact that high medical authorities have attributed to it a real hygienic value, especially in warm climates. No one need feel any difficulty in supposing that this common conception attached to the rite also in the minds of the Hebrews. Rather all the more fitting it was, if there was a basis in fact for this familiar opinion, that God should thus have taken a ceremony already known to the surrounding peoples, and in itself of a wholesome physical effect, and constituted it for Abraham and his seed a symbol of an analogous spiritual fact, namely, the purification of sin at its fountain-head, the cleansing of the evil nature with which we all are born. When the Hebrew infant was circumcised it was an outward sign and seal of the covenant of God with Abraham and with his seed to be a God to him and to his seed after him; and it signified further that this covenant of God was to be carried out and made effectual only through the putting away of the flesh, the corrupt nature with which we are born, and of all that belongs to it, in order that, thus circumcised with the circumcision of the heart, every child of Abraham might indeed be an Israelite in whom there should be no guile. And the law commands, in accord with the original command to Abraham, that the circumcision should take place on the eighth day. This is the more noticeable, that among other nations which practised or still practise the rite the time is different. The Egyptians circumcised their sons between the sixth and tenth years, the modern Mohammedans between the twelfth and fourteenth. What is the significance of this eighth day? In the first place, it is easy to see that we have in this direction a provision of God's mercy; for if delayed beyond infancy or early childhood, as among many other peoples, the operation is much more serious, and may even involve some danger, while in so early infancy it is comparatively trifling, and attended with no risk. Further, by the administration of circumcision at the very opening of life it is suggested that in the Divine ideal the grace which was signified thereby, of the cleansing of nature, was to be bestowed upon the child, not first at a late period of life, but from its very beginning, thus anticipating the earliest awakening of the principle of inborn sin. But the question still remains, Why was the eighth day selected, and not rather, e.g., the sixth or seventh, which weald have no less perfectly represented these ideas? The answer is to be found in the symbolic significance of the eighth day. As the old creation was completed in six days, with a following Sabbath of rest, so that six is ever the number of the old creation, as under imperfection and sin, the eighth day, the first of a new week, everywhere in Scripture appears as the number symbolic of the new creation, in which all things shall be restored in the great redemption through the Second Adam. The thought finds its fullest expression in the resurrection of Christ, as the Firstborn from the dead, the Beginning and the Lord of the new creation, who in His resurrection body manifested the firstfruits in physical life of the new creation, rising from the dead on the first, or, in other words, the day after the seventh, the eighth day.

(S. H. Kellogg, D. D.)

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KJV: And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying,

WEB: Yahweh spoke to Moses, saying,