Lepers and circumcisions? What is to be done?

So as Evgenia and I joked on our last ep, writing my novel has turned me into a rabbi…as I’m constantly studying ancient Jewish texts. And I have say, the Jewish religion is an interesting one. It’s very text-based, very serious, very lawyerly. No wonder we Jews have excelled in the legal profession — arguing finer legal points has been the basis of our religion and culture gong back 2,000 years.

What do I mean?

So I just did my own translation of Genesis 17, which is where YHWH forces Abraham to circumcise himself and all the males in his camp, slaves or not. There are various religious commentaries on this passage, central as it is to the mythological Jewish pact with the Hebrew god. I was looking up these commentaries to figure out what the old rabbis thought of it all. Why did their god force them to do this? What was the meaning? I was disappointed on that front. I couldn’t find much deep discussion of the “why.” But I did find other conversations about this passage that gave me insight into the hardcore legalistic nature of the religion.

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Here’s one of them: It comes from the Talmud, rabbinic literature that codified and explained practices and laws that rabbis and proto-rabbis derived from the Torah. The bit below is a small fragment from a much longer discussion on a topic that clearly was very important to the beards back then: Can someone with a leprous penis be circumcised?