Cut or uncut?
WHEN men go in the buff, one thing is
immediately apparent in their appearance: whether they are circumcised or
uncircumcised. It should be no big deal – in the Western world, there are large communities that, for one reason or another, do circumcise their sons, and others that do not. Nobody should look askance at those of the other persuasion, even if you’re the only one in a crowd who’s different. In the Ancient world, though, it was a big deal. For the Ancient Greeks and those others – including the Romans – that followed their culture, there were very strict rules about what was proper and what was improper when one was naked.
As mentioned in this article, it was regarded as being barbarian to have body hair of any kind. And every male had to have a foreskin, because it concealed the glans penis. Exposing that was regarded (when one was in public) as being obscene.
It doesn’t seem to have crossed their minds that what is obscene in mixed company is the erectile penis, not simply the exposed glans penis.
Their rules for that kind of thing were different from ours, too, since they had a high regard for homosexual relations between adult men and boys in the gymnasium – but I won’t go into that aspect here.
However, for Greeks and Romans this arrangement – that is, being naked and hairless, and having a foreskin – was perfectly acceptable.
One ethnic group stood out in this crowd, however: Jews.
By and large, Jews weren’t interested in being part of these aspects of Greek culture – gymnastics and athletics.
They kept largely to their own society, where nakedness was much more restricted. That is not to say that there were no occasions when men or women were naked together, since they did bath (in this the sexes remained apart, however). Indeed, for women, ritual baths were of great religious significance, and among the Orthodox, they still are today.
When men bathed in company, it was apparent to all who was Jewish, since every Jewish boy is required to be circumcised at the age of eight days, and those who miss out on this (for whatever reason) are still expected to be circumcised as adults.
It is recorded in Acts 16:1-3 that the Apostle Paul personally circumcised Timothy, the son of a Greek father and a Jewish mother, so that he would be accepted in the Jewish communities where the two would be working as missionaries.
Jews and Greeks did not live in rigidly separated communities.
Many Greeks and Romans were attracted to the Jewish way of life, to the extent that there were groups of Gentiles in each city who were known as God-fearing people. Special seating was provided for God-fearers (both Jew and Gentile) at the stadiums, so that they would not have to mix with the out-and-out pagans.
And in the other direction there were some Jews who aspired to the Greek way of life, and wanted to take part in gymnastics and athletics.
Here, of course, there was an immediate stumbling block: the lack of a foreskin.
Jews aspiring to athletics had to undergo a painful operation that would provide them with an artificial foreskin.
In athletics today, this is an entirely irrelevant consideration, because modern athletes are clothed.
There are those naturist idealists who look forward to a time when competitors in the Olympic Games will be naked, as they were at Ancient Olympia.
It is to be hoped that, if this ideal is attained, it will not be required of male competitors to be either circumcised or uncircumcised – or, indeed, hairless or hairy[1] – and that all these conditions would be seen as being decent.
– Strandloper
For a further discussion of circumcision, see this article.
[1] My personal preference would be for not removing body hair, as outlined in other articles, but it would be restrictive to either forbid body hair or to make it compulsory.
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e-mail me: Strandloper