Adding-to or Subtracting from Torah
“You shall not add to that which I command you and you shall not subtract from it, to keep the commandments of the YHVH your G-d...” (Deut. 4:2)
In this week's parashah, you will read about the rape of Dinah, and the response of her brothers, Simon and Levi. Tricking the men of the town to give themselves a circumcision, they hack all of the residents to death, which is no mean feat for the teenage boys. It says in verse 34:25 that all of the men were in pain. It is assumed that they were completely incapacitated and that the town, which Simon and Levy will take for their own, was incapable of protecting itself from a couple of teenage boys - neither the men who were in pain, nor the women who were not.
It's a miracle!
But how much pain could they have been in?
When people think of circumcision, they think of brit periah, which is how it has been done for about the last 1900 years (sometime after 120 CE, most likely). Brit milah is something else.
Most people don't know this, nor can they tell you the difference.
During the BCE period, Jews were already assimilating and wanted to be part of the Greek culture. That culture found the public uncovering of the head of the penis unseemly, and many activities during that time required that participants, especially in gymnasiums, be nude.
According to Martial, a 1st century author in "Epigrams", writes of Jews who tried to pretend that they were uncircumcised by pulling the foreskin back over the heat of the penis and tying it with a fibula, and were embarrassed when they came undone in public.
The Talmud reports of Rabbis passing rules that this act of "Epispasm" (undoing the circumcision), is forbidden, and threatened those who were doing so with "no share in the world to come". The Rambam echoes this in his Mishneh Torah Tshuvah 3:6.
While people read these words, they rarely think upon them.
How does one stretch the foreskin after a circumcision?
If you are thinking of a brit periah, as circumcisions are done today, it would have been impossible for Jews to do epispasm. What could they pull? What skin could they stretch to force the skin to eventually cover the head of the penis?
Despite the number of possible techniques, the reality is that the type of circumcision reported by 1st century doctors prior to to implementation of brit periah is this:
The one performing the circumcision would take a sheet of leather with a small hole. The child's penis would be pressed against to that only the head of the penis with the surrounding foreskin protruded. A knife was used to trim that extra skin (those born with shorter foreskins did not have more of it removed). And that was brit milah.
Brit Periah was the Rabbinical brainchild to stop the mass assimilation that was going on after the fall of the temple and the holocaust known as the Bar Kochba Rebellion.
What is Brit Periah?
Today, the mohel trims away all of the orlah (foreskin), then goes down further and scrapes away the periah, the mucus membrane that provides lubrication, usually with the thumbnail. Some Rabbis justify the change by saying that brit periah is what God intended (see the commentaries in Joshua 5:3-5:5 which doesn't mention any such thing, but is often used to justify the act).
So did the people of Shechem suffer?
As with any type of cutting, removing a small bit of foreskin was probably irritating as hell, and given the lack of antiseptics, there was likely some inflammation.
But it certainly wasn't incapacitating.
Was it enough to stop the men from defending themselves? And were the Middle-Eastern women so dainty that they couldn't defend their husbands? According to Deuteronomy 25:12, women were pretty adept to defend their husbands, even without weapons.
No. It's just a plot device in the story to explain how a couple of kids could wipe out an entire city and take possession of it all by themselves.
And it's just a story. Just like saying that the circumcision that Jews do today was commanded by God.
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