Covenant of Blood: Circumcision and Gender in Rabbinic Judaism

by Lawrence A. Hoffman

Central to both biblical narrative and rabbinic commentary, circumcision has remained a defining rite of Jewish identity, a symbol so powerful that challenges to it have always been considered taboo. Lawrence Hoffman seeks to find out why circumcision holds such an important place in the Jewish psyche. He traces the symbolism of circumcision through Jewish history, examining its evolution as a symbol of the covenant in the post-exilic period of the Bible and its subsequent meaning in the formative era of Mishnah and Talmud.

In the rabbinic system, Hoffman argues, circumcision was neither a birth ritual nor the beginning of the human life cycle, but a rite of covenantal initiation into a male "life line." Although the evolution of the rite was shaped by rabbinic debates with early Christianity, the Rabbis shared with the church a view of blood as providing salvation. Hoffman examines the particular significance of circumcision blood, which, in addition to its salvific role, contrasted with menstrual blood to symbolize the gender dichotomy within the rabbinic system. His analysis of the Rabbis' views of circumcision and menstrual blood sheds light on the marginalization of women in rabbinic law. Differentiating official mores about gender from actual practice, Hoffman surveys women's spirituality within rabbinic society and examines the roles mothers played in their sons' circumcisions until the medieval period, when they were finally excluded.

Genres: Religion, Judaism

262 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1996

About the author

Dr. Lawrence A. Hoffman was ordained as a rabbi in 1969, received his Ph.D. in 1973, and has taught since then at the Hebrew Union College - Jewish Institute of Religion, in New York. From 1984 to 1987, he directed its School of Sacred Music as well. In 2003, he was named the first Barbara and Stephen Friedman Professor of Liturgy, Worship and Ritual. He teaches classes in liturgy, ritual, spirituality, theology and synagogue leadership. For almost forty years, he has combined research, teaching, and a passion for the spiritual renewal of North American Judaism.

Rabbi Hoffman has written or edited over forty books, including My People's Prayer Book (Jewish Lights Publishing), a ten-volume edition of the Siddur with modern commentaries, which was named a National Jewish Book Award winner for 2007. His Rethinking Synagogues: A New Vocabulary for Congregational Life (Jewish Lights Publishing) and his Art of Public Prayer (Skylight Paths) are widely used by churches and synagogues as guides to organizational visioning and liturgical renewal. In 2011, he received a second National Jewish Book Award for co-authoring Sacred Strategies: Transforming Synagogues from Functional to Visionary (Alban Institute).

His articles, both popular and scholarly, have appeared in eight languages and four continents, and include contributions to such encyclopedias as The Macmillan Encyclopedia of Religion, The Oxford Dictionary of Religion, The Encyclopedia of Judaism and The Encyclopedia of Religion in America. He syndicates a regular column which appears, among other places, in The Jewish Week and The Jewish Times; and writes a blog entitled "Life and a Little Liturgy."

For many years, Rabbi Hoffman served as visiting professor of the University of Notre Dame, and has lectured at such places as the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, the University of Southern California, and the Yale Divinity School.

In 1990, Dr. Hoffman was selected by the United States Navy as a member of a three-person design team, charged with developing a continuing education course on worship for chaplains. He is a past-president of the North American Academy of Liturgy, the professional and academic organization for liturgists, and in January 2004, received that organization's annual Berakhah Award, for outstanding lifetime contributions to his field.

In 1994, he co-founded "Synagogue 2000," a trans-denominational project to envision the ideal synagogue "as moral and spiritual center" for the 21st century. As Synagogue 3000, it has launched Next Dor, a national initiative to engage the next generation through a relational approach featuring strong communities with transformed synagogues at their center.

He founded and is Academic Coordinator of the Tisch Fellowship Program.

Reviews

[Jan Rice · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book caught my eye because I was writing something on blood and justice in scripture. I soon saw, though, that the book's subject is the meaning of circumcision and blood in rabbinical Judaism, which is much later -- late antiquity and the medieval period -- so I thought I would take just a quick look for what I might need to learn. I thought I'd just read a few early chapters.

It turns out the author has dealt with the historical context back to biblical times and onward from that point. And so the book turned out to be an answer to a wish for more historical knowledge. To explain what I mean and what I had been looking for, here is a quote from Jon D. Levenson (http://www.jewishreviewofbooks.com/pu...) for "those who think they can sidestep historical reconstruction in their interpretation of biblical (or other) texts:"

Whether we acknowledge it or not, we inevitably presuppose one historical backdrop or another. The choice is not whether to locate a text in a historical world. It is whether to do so poorly or well.

I'm not talking about writing books, as Jon D. Levenson is. But when it comes to scripture such assumptions are even more prevalent. It's a matter of either learning more history or being condemned to conventional thinking--by which I don't necessarily mean "official" positions but views that are nonetheless prevalent.

My next challenge was that I thought this book was "above my pay grade," as they say. It's a work of scriptural scholarship so is not light reading, but as anybody who has tried self-diagnosis, for example, has discovered, the ability to read complex specialized texts has some transferability between disciplines. I got hooked, persisted, and made discoveries--some historical, some approaches (ways of thinking).

What I want to do is record some of the discoveries that were important to me before returning this book to the library. I'll have to do that at my present level of understanding. If I have occasions to learn more, I'll revisit and add. Also, this isn't necessarily a systematic recounting.

I referred above to "official" positions. The author differentiated between "official" and "public" approaches--what is officially believed vs. what everybody acts as though they believe. I knew that in a nebulous way, but the author's conceptualization is more precise and comprehensible.

The priestly class were the last redactors of the Hebrew Bible (the Tanakh). They left their mark on it, and that's how it tends to get read. In pre-exilic writings circumcision wasn't (yet) the essence of covenant, or necessarily even a sign of covenant. The earlier covenant during monarchic times had to do with the contract regarding the land, and circumcision only tangentially. For the priests, after return from the exile, there was no more monarchy. Theirs was a theocracy. Their need was to pass on an inherited priesthood. So their concern was with genealogy and lineage. They needed male progeny, and circumcision related to fertility, as the author shows by its connection to pruning a fruit tree. Trees--and males--needed to be fruitful and multiply. All of that is the unofficial meaning. Officially, circumcision became the sign of the covenant. It symbolized perfection -- being whole and complete (shalem) and perfect (tamim) before God, thus qualified to carry on the covenant from generation to generation. In contrast, by the time of the Rabbis (after the fall of Jerusalem and the Temple in 70 CE), there is no more monarchy and no more theocracy, either. Theirs was a new reality. Their preoccupation also involved the passing on of the covenant from father to son through the generations, but in those times the unofficial meaning of circumcision came to be salvation by the blood, with wine the iconic representation for blood. Each of these progressive iterations, from the J and E sources through the P source and onward to the early Rabbis, involved increasing emphasis on the importance of patrilineal descent, as well as the need to cope with the problem (for them) of the corresponding matrilineal thread.

Hoffman gives two broad reasons Jews don't easily concede the iconic property of wine. First, wine-as-blood is Christian, so saying it's Jewish as well leads to denial. It's easy to think that aspect of Christianity (as well as others) arose in the pagan milieu, for example, from the mystery religions. I know because when I first began to study, that's what I thought. But scholars no longer believe that. For example, Lawrence Schiffman, in his two lectures on the Gospels in Odyssey of the West II -- From Athens to Rome and the Gospels, says aspects of Christianity arose, not from pagan sources, but from forms of Judaism that no longer exist. The second reason for Jews' difficulty with wine as an icon for blood is the blood libel that used to be an excuse for anti-Jewish violence. Examples of blood libel are the belief that Jews used the blood of Christian children in Passover matzoh, or that Jews tortured the Host (Christian Communion bread) to make it bleed. It should be needless to say (but maybe is not) that there is not a shred of evidence--or plausibility--for any of the formulations of the blood libel.

At this point let me reiterate that Covenant of Blood is a work of scholarship, which means it is history, not theology. It also means that as part of the process the author cites textual sources and prior or competing theories in making and supporting his conclusions, while I, of necessity, am focusing on the conclusions.

I think the most significant concept I've gained is one from the sociology of religion: the concept of the "plausibility structure," according to which reality as we experience it is a social construct that must be maintained socially. The illustrative example Hoffman uses is from Peter Berger,
The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion.

The religious world of pre-Columbian Peru was objectively and subjectively real as long as its plausibility structure, namely, pre-Columbian Inca society, remained intact.... When the conquering Spaniards destroyed this plausibility structure, the reality of the world based on it began to disintegrate with terrifying rapidity.... When Pizarro killed Atahalpa...he shattered a world, (and) redefined reality.... What previously had been existence in the nomos of the Inca world, now became, first, unspeakable anomy, then a more or less nomized existence on the fringes of the Spaniards' world--that other world, alien and vastly powerful, which imposed itself as reality-defining facticity upon the numbed consciousness of the conquered.

After the exile (586-538 BCE), the priesthood had the support of the plausibility structure of the day. Upon the return from the exile, the remnants of monarchical society existed along with the institution of prophecy (the "loyal opposition"), and the priestly system, all of whom vied for power; the winners were the priests. The monarchic remnants had lacked support during the exile, since the land had been the reason for their existence. Also, the Zoroastrian Persian hegemony mitigated against resumption of an independent monarchy and, in the author's estimation, granted special status to priests. But the plausibility structure supporting the priesthood itself soon went into decline--not abrupt, as in the example of the Incas, but gradual and with ups and downs, as it came into conflict with the Hellenistic and then the Roman empire.

This book also sheds light on the history of synagogues. There has been a traditional line of thought that synagogues arose during the exile, but that belief, albeit logically plausible, lacks supporting evidence. There were synagogues by Jesus' and Paul's day. Scripture was read there. They were gathering places and what used to be called "crash pads." They could serve as law courts or as the sites of local charity funds. The corresponding Hebrew is bet hakeneset. They did not start out as houses of prayer. Two other institutions had already begun to serve that role. Little is known about the first, ma'amad, some sort of gathering in the public square. The second is the chavurah, dining clubs that reflected a dominant Hellenistic trend. Of those there were two sorts, ad hoc and membership chavurot (the plural). The latter had more stringent guidelines. I hope to have a chance to learn a little more here, and will add when I do.

It was the chaverot that were the first province of the Rabbis, not the synagogues--at least not for centuries. Synagogues had been much more egalitarian. Women could have prominent roles there, could even be synagogue leaders. That changed gradually over succeeding centuries as rabbinical authority came to prevail there. The resulting misogyny paralleled what was happening in Christianity with the male priesthood and male dominance. I have read elsewhere opinions, on one hand, that Judaism was egalitarian for centuries, with women and men worshiping together in synagogues, and eventually succumbed to dominant Christian and Muslim practice. One also hears the opposite view, much more prevalent in our culture -- that everything that Christians today find objectionable, including misogyny, entered Christianity via Judaism. This book leads me to think neither is true, and, rather, that the two faiths were on more nearly parallel tracks representing the times.

The author points to evidence of how women's spirituality existed alongside the official portrayal, but since the (male) rabbis and their agents were writing it up, it didn't get recorded directly, for example, in the Talmud. Responsa, which are the written decisions and rulings in response to inquiries about practice, liturgy, and the like, provided an alternative and less official written source.

The author also argues that and shows how, despite appearances, Leviticus focuses on purity/impurity of sexual matters per se and not so much on women as negative and on the menstrual taboo to the degree that occurred later (Chapter 8). And in Chapter 9, his focus is the purity system, where, debating the ubiquitous Mary Douglas, he argues that "purity" is the object of the system and holiness the quality of the parts. Eventually I hope to expand my remarks in these areas.

Whereas during the Middle Ages, the official meaning of salvation for Jews had come to refer to the afterlife, the author argues that the public (unofficial) meaning centered more nearly on the needs of this life.

As Christianity detached from Judaism, circumcision came to represent the essence of works and deed in their ensuing works vs. faith debate. Circumcision was the quintessential work. Baptism became the spiritualized Christian substitute for circumcision.

Lawrence Hoffman has some interesting hypotheses about the relationship between the two religions and even originally between their liturgies. As to those liturgies nowadays, I've experienced some of both, and have noticed significant commonalities that would likely surprise people. The author and Paul F. Bradshaw have edited The Making of Jewish and Christian Worship, so there's an opportunity for further learning in that area.

The author presents a very graceful afterword in which he describes the personal stumbling blocks he, as an inheritor of rabbinic Judaism, as a liberal, and a feminist, overcame in bringing this book to publication. He also deals with liberal and societal pressures against circumcision, and I am here speaking of pressures from within Judaism, and he goes into why the custom has prevailed. To simplify, it remains essential, parallel to baptism in Christianity. The ritual no longer has those same public meanings it had acquired by the Middle Ages. Other changes have been underway in terms of medical aspects and in terms of egalitarianism. That afterword remains relevant today, 17 years after the book was published.

If in writing this book the author had to go through a process of self-examination, how much more so do I, in deciding to write a public review of it.

In that afterword he says that scholars used to be taught to keep "facts" and "values" separate, that the latter were just "opinions." They thought they could just let the chips fall where they may, so to speak. But now facts and opinions are understood to be intertwined, he says, with many philosophers contending they are known in much the same way. What we study has an impact on what we know about the world, he says, and on how we ought to behave. Further, social scientists concur, "...explaining the so-called objective stance of the observer as a vestige of academic colonialism and its consequent disregard for the culture it studies."

He wrote his book out of a commitment to finish what he had begun and out of the commitment to come to terms with problematic findings rather than dismissing them. I'm writing my book review 1st out of a decision not to self-censor. Second, it is a characteristic in Judaism to study all the biblical texts, including the problematical ones (as opposed to cherry-picking), so probably that has influenced me. Plus I just love learning the history and connections. That makes me feel more religious, not less, and I have to work on articulating why that's the case, since it's just the opposite for so many people.


I see the book is available on Google Books, but of course that means I would need an exact term to search....

[Rob Vanhoff · Rating 4 out of 5]

A well-written and thought provoking case study: how to approach a multi-layered liturgical tex-tradition when looking for the origins and development of the ritual behind it. Though concentrating on rabbinics, Hoffman does not shy away from inclusion of early Christian sources.

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stop male genital mutilation. This is a good overview of the tradition but doesn’t go far enough in suggesting that we abandon this barbaric tradition.

[Esther · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book on the history of circumcision in the Jewish tradition. Really fascinating stuff!