Why did the children of Israel have to be circumcised twice?

Question

Josh.5
[2] At that time the LORD said unto Joshua, Make thee sharp knives, and circumcise again the children of Israel the second time.

Answer 1

O.M.G.--- I think you've stumbled onto something.---That's the reason that so few of the Jews are hung.---He, most likely ,overdid it with all that pecker-chopping .

He really needs to knock off all that horse-play, those poor Jews have been popping pills like crazy, trying to get their peckers to grow back to the original size.
The poor things didn't have that much to begin with. Now they're moving to Miami by the thousands to keep that cold weather from further shrinking their little do-dads.

You may have become their new savior.

Answer 2

Bandycat5,

You have a couple of good answers but I would just add:

As the Hebrew and later the Christian bible developed and matured it was re-written and changed time and again. Many times the “translators” had no hesitation to make changes to the stories or add something to deal with a particular event or problem occurring in the community when the translation was being done. Writers in one century often added events, mostly predictions by important figures, that occurred in the writers century but appeared to be predicted decades before so as to lend credence to a character.

Probably at the time the piece dealing with circumcision was written the community had strong feelings about the subject. If I am writing about a famous character in my story and there was a famine in the last decade, (eight or ten years previous), that was well documented say in 471 CE, I could have a character known to have existed in the second century predict that if the “children of Israel did or didn’t do something god would cause a famine to punish the “people of Israel”! This would lend a great deal of credence to the character, whoever it might have been.

Any book, such as the bible, is mostly fictional history at best and sometimes made-up events that never really happened. If we are having a problem with believers donating money we might look for some terrible event a few years previous and have an ancient character refer to the event as I, the translator, do the current translation. This process serves a number of purposes, for example: it up-dates the bible, it gives credence to a current church position, it would serve as verification to the casual reader and so on.

Keep asking questions kiddo, it is with questions that we learn as we try to answer them. Additionally, never just accept some answer, no matter how well it is written, until you do your research. The exceptions to this rule are accepting things like the math supporting g relativity or the biological research supporting the human genome, these things I accept on faith since the proofs have been done for peer review. I may not, for example, be able to prove the formula for the orbit of a planet but so many people can do this and have done this that when they agree, I accept the answer on faith.

Answer 3

Because all the males that came out of Egypt were circumcised but later died during there 40 year trek in the wilderness.

During that time most of the families ignored
Jehovah's command of circumcision thus still having the reproach of Egypt on them.

So if they wanted to enter the promise land
led by the now chosen Joshua, He had to go around a second time to make sure all the males were circumcised before entering the promise land, not that the ones who were circumcised had to be done twice just the ones that were not.

Joshua 5:4-8

If you would like I could send you a new book called " What does the Bible really teach"? Free, no catches or obligations.

Sincerely yours,
Fred M. Hunter
[e-mail]

Answer 4

read a little further.
copying and pasting from the provided link...

2 At that time HaShem said unto Joshua: 'Make thee knives of flint, and circumcise again the children of Israel the second time.'
3 And Joshua made him knives of flint, and circumcised the children of Israel at Gibeath-ha-araloth.
4 And this is the cause why Joshua did circumcise: all the people that came forth out of Egypt, that were males, even all the men of war, died in the wilderness by the way, after they came forth out of Egypt.
5 For all the people that came out were circumcised; but all the people that were born in the wilderness by the way as they came forth out of Egypt, had not been circumcised.


it tells you the answer RIGHT there in the text.

Answer 5

Need to finish reading it explains

1And it came to pass, when all the kings of the Amorites, which were on the side of Jordan westward, and all the kings of the Canaanites, which were by the sea, heard that the LORD had dried up the waters of Jordan from before the children of Israel, until we were passed over, that their heart melted, neither was there spirit in them any more, because of the children of Israel.

2At that time the LORD said unto Joshua, Make thee sharp knives, and circumcise again the children of Israel the second time.

3And Joshua made him sharp knives, and circumcised the children of Israel at the hill of the foreskins.

4And this is the cause why Joshua did circumcise: All the people that came out of Egypt, that were males, even all the men of war, died in the wilderness by the way, after they came out of Egypt.

5Now all the people that came out were circumcised: but all the people that were born in the wilderness by the way as they came forth out of Egypt, them they had not circumcised.

6For the children of Israel walked forty years in the wilderness, till all the people that were men of war, which came out of Egypt, were consumed, because they obeyed not the voice of the LORD: unto whom the LORD sware that he would not shew them the land, which the LORD sware unto their fathers that he would give us, a land that floweth with milk and honey.

7And their children, whom he raised up in their stead, them Joshua circumcised: for they were uncircumcised, because they had not circumcised them by the way.

Answer 6

They didn't have to be circumcised twice. They were the children of the ones who died in the wilderness who had never been circumcised. The circumcision was the second one - but there was a 40 year difference.

Answer 7

"4 And this is the cause why Joshua did circumcise: All the people that came out of Egypt, that were males, even all the men of war, died in the wilderness by the way, after they came out of Egypt.
5 Now all the people that came out were circumcised: but all the people that were born in the wilderness by the way as they came forth out of Egypt, them they had not circumcised."

Answer 8

The knives mustn't have been so sharp the first time.

Answer 9

That sounds painful.

Answer 10

to satisfy their penis fetish without actually defying their religion. Mutilating ones body does not bring you closer to God, if god wanted me to not have skin on the head of cock he would not have put it there.