y to losing either the
right hand or the phallus, a pile of which is visible in one corner of
the foreground; from this sculpture we learn that the practice was not
only an individual performance, but that it was a national usage among
the Egyptians as well, who subjected, at times, their vanquished foes to
its ordeal in a wholesale but business-like manner.

Bergmann argues that the Israelites were given to like practices, and
cites the incident wherein David brought two hundred prepuces--as
evidence of his having slaughtered that number of Philistines--to Saul,
as a mark of his being worthy to be his son-in-law. He argues that,
whereas many have made that Old Testament passage to read "two hundred
prepuces," it should have read "two hundred virile members" which David
and his companions had cut off from the Philistines, the word _orloth_
meaning the virile member, and not the prepuce. That Israelitish
circumcision could have originated from either phallic worship or any of
the hero-warrior usages is untenable as a proposition, as regards the
living prisoners, and is contrary to the monotheistic idea which ruled
Israel, or to the benign nature of their God. The strict opposition of
the religion of Judaism to any other mutilation except that of the
covenant is also antagonistic to the views advanced by Bergmann, as it
is well known that even emasculated animals were considered imperfect
and unclean, and therefore unfit to be received or offered as a
sacrifice to their deity. No emasculated man was allowed to enter the
priesthood or assist at sacrifices. The whole idea of Judaism being
opposed to such mutilations, their observance of circumcision and its
performance can in no way have developed from either phallic or other
warlike rites or usages; but we must accept its origin as a purely
religious rite,--a covenant of the most rigid observance, coincident in
its inception with the formation of the Hebraic creed in the hills of
Chaldea.

What Herodotus or Pythagoras may have written concerning the practice
among the Egyptians was written, as already remarked, some nine
centuries after Moses had recorded his laws; Moses himself having come
some centuries after Abraham. Herodotus is quoted as representing that
the Phoenicians borrowed the practice from the Egyptians, in support of
the theory that Egypt was the central nucleus from whence the practice
started, and not that it traveled toward Egypt from Phoenicia. The
diff