purification, and was associated with those committed to spiritual and intellectual development.

Circumcision features prominently in the Hebrew Bible. The narrative in Genesis 17, considered to have taken place around the year 1800 BCE, describes the circumcision of Abraham and Abraham’s relatives and slaves, making Abraham the first named individual to undergo the procedure. In the same chapter, the descendants of Abraham are commanded to circumcise their sons on the eighth day of life. Many generations after Abraham, Moses (traditionally calculated to have lived around 1300 BCE) was raised by the Egyptian elite, so circumcision was doubtless familiar to him. For the Jews of the time, circumcision wasn’t as much a spiritual act as it was physical: it was an outward sign of their covenant with God, and enabledthe penis to allow a Jew to fulfill properly the commandment to create offspring. Outside of considering that it was taken up by the Jews purely as a biblical commandment, scholars have suggested that Abraham and his followers adopted circumcision from neighboring cultures as a means to make penile hygiene easier in hot, sandy climates; as a rite of passage into adulthood; or as a form of blood sacrifice.

Alexander the Great the conquered the Middle East in the 4th century BCE, and with him in the centuries that followed came ancient Greek culture and values. The Greeks abhorred circumcision, and this made life for circumcized Jews living among the Greeks (and later the Romans) very difficult. Antiochus Epiphanes (d. 164 BCE) outlawed circumcision, as did Hadrian (d. 138