As everybody knows by now, having a circumcised penis cuts a man's risk of contacting AIDS from heterosexual sex by half. Those ancient Israelites were some astute scientists:
Uncircumcised men are thought to be more susceptible because the underside of the foreskin is rich in Langerhans cells, sentinel cells of the immune system, which attach easily to the human immunodeficiency virus, which causes AIDS. The foreskin also often suffers small tears during intercourse.
So here's my question: was this just blind luck on the part of Abraham and his offspring? Does cutting off the foreskin have any practical benefits besides preventing the spread of HIV? This isn't as silly a query as it might seem. After all, scholars have come up with all sorts of nifty explanations for other religious rituals and taboos. For example, some argue that Jews who keep kosher abstain from shellfish and pork because those food products tend to carry deadly diseases, especially when you're lost in the desert. In other words, the obscure laws of Leviticus actually had some sort of adaptive value way back when. (Take that Richard Dawkins!) This doesn't mean that Moses understood the germ theory of disease. It just implies that some sort of cultural evolution was taking place, and that this ancient tribe realized that certain rituals kept you from getting trichinosis.
But I'm not aware of circumcision having any adaptive value apart from reducing the risk of HIV infection. (Other studies tend to support this view.) Given that AIDS wasn't a big problem for the ancient Israelites, this leaves us with two tantalizing possibilities: either God really is prophetic and he created a ritual that would reap benefits a few thousand years hence, or the authors of the Old Testament just got lucky.
Update: There's a third possibility: the Israelites were trying to reduce the risk of cervical cancer. See Razib's astute comment below. He also makes the important point that circumcision was common among other semitic peoples as well.
My own hunch is that the authors of the bible were just looking for some way to connect God to a ritual of human fertility. They looked around, saw this extra flap of skin on the penis, and decided that removing it would be a nice way of thanking God for giving Abraham and Sarah a baby boy named Isaac. Having read the Old Testament for the first time in college, I was struck by its prurient obsession with sex. God is very adamant that he controls our fertility, and so it's only natural that he would want to denote this by marking our bodies.
Comments (9)
Does cutting off the foreskin have any practical benefits besides preventing the spread of HIV?
there are studies in india that cut men's partners (women) have lower rates of cervical cancer. they compared muslim and non-muslim men. the thing is that these benefits seem to be a LOT less in modern conditions. e.g., south korea and japan have the same HIV rate, though s.k. is cut & japan isn't. the USA has a higher HIV rate than most of europe. sweden has the same cervical cancer rate as the USA.
as for the israelites
a) circumcision was common in the area. the egyptians and various semitic peoples did it (the european 'sea peoples' are noted in the 12th century for their foreskins)
b) there is some research which suggests that ancient circumcision was far less extreme insofar as a great deal of the foreskin remained. rabbis chided jews who went to classical gymnaseums and stretched their foreskin manually to make it seem intact. the implication being that full removal was not always, or ever, the case in the ancient world.
Posted by: razib | December 14, 2006 5:35 PM