OPINION
Harry Palmer
I paid a visit to Egypt and the Holy Land in April/May 2023, my third in around 15 years. After a stopover in Dubai – how much that place has changed since the days when I joined my ship there in 1965! – we flew to Cairo and my fellow NZ tourists and I spent a couple of weeks visiting the ancient remains of many temples. We even stayed in the same hotel in Aswan as Agatha Christie did when she wrote Death on the Nile.
We of course paid an obligatory visit to the famous Cairo Museum, where our guide, who had been with us all around Egypt and had been an Egyptologist at this museum several years before, showed us around. While looking at the statues, mummies and artefacts in their glass cases, I jokingly asked our guide why the Egyptian statues don’t have penises like Greek statues do. He said they did have one naked statue like that in the museum. When we came across it, it turned out to be a statue of a high priest to an ancient Egyptian king of four or five thousand years ago. So examining his penis – as you do – I observed that he had been circumcised. On enquiring further of the guide, it seems that circumcision was practiced for reasons of perhaps both culture and hygiene by the ancient Egyptians well before God required Abraham and his many descendants to accept circumcision as a sign of the covenant they had with God.
The ‘uncircumcised’ are quite often referred to in the Old Testament as being the enemy or foreigners alien to the Hebrew faith, as though it was a practice unique to them alone. So it was quite intriguing for me to discover this titbit of information. And this is my point: not everything you read in the Bible can be taken at face value. Interpretation or further background knowledge is sometimes required.
When the lovely stewardess on the Emirates flight returning me to NZ asked what I had learned on my tour around the Middle East, I related the above story to her. Instead of fleeing, she actually agreed that it was very interesting. She might have been Jewish, or perhaps she just thought I was some mad professor, like the one in Back to the Future perhaps. Anyway, kudos to Emirates for having such well-trained staff.