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Still looking to keep the Skeppies happy with diversions, Skeptic X has this on circumcision in the Bible, specifically Gen. 17:13-14:

He that is born in thy house, and he that is bought with thy money, must needs be circumcised: and my covenant shall be in your flesh for an everlasting covenant. And the uncircumcised man child whose flesh of his foreskin is not circumcised, that soul shall be cut off from his people; he hath broken my covenant.

Skeptic X wants to make hash of this, under the assumption that "cut off" means "kill". He says there are "numerous examples" where "cut off" and "kill" or equivalents "were used interchangeably in reference to the same offenses," and we don't doubt that some parallels exist, but one would think an expert on "homographs" and "figurative" language like Skeptic X would know better than to make such a statement with absolute certainty. The real scholars do not; Driver's commentary, for example, argues that "cut off" is used for both a death penalty and for exclusion from the covenant people; he supposes it was an "archaic judicial formula" which originally meant a death sentence, but came to mean "a strong affirmation of divine disapproval." But we'll look at this more closely below.

Still, that isn't the issue at hand; what is at hand here is a complaint that -- aside from the usual griping about the Amalekites (see here, Skeptic X, you don't stand a chance -- for reader reference, note that Skeptic X refers to Miller's work as "inerrantist flapdoodle") -- this makes hash of Josh. 5 where the post-Exodus generation was circumcised but not punished for disobedience. I replied that they could hardly disobey if they did not receive a command to be circumcised. Skeptic X tries to wheedle around this with the Genesis command, as follows:

1. An eight-day-old male child would also not know about the command to be circumcised, but according to Genesis 17:14, he was nevertheless to be "cut off" from his people; that is, he was to be killed. You might say that [Holding]'s god Yahweh didn't consider ignorance of the law to be any excuse.

2. Yahweh's original command was that Abraham's descendants were to be circumcised throughout their generations. Would that not have included the wilderness generation? If not, why not?

3. The Hebrews practiced circumcision during the time of their Egyptian bondage.

Skeptic X the Red Skelton wannabee asks why then Yahweh, or Caleb, Joshua and Moses, didn't go right out and kill all 600,000 or so of those uncircumcised disobeyers. Well, this one is frankly so inane that Skeptic X has just earned the right to reprise the role of Bozo the Clown up north of his home, in Chicago. Number 3 is true, but all this amounts to is that Israel was disobedient in keeping this command. We are left with the implication Skeptic X is trying to wrest from the texts, that if Gen. 17 is right, the post-Exodus generation should have gotten no breaks, since an unknowing baby didn't either.

Allowing the "kill" interpretation for the sake of argument, we could even take this to a ridiculous extreme if Skeptic X desires, and suggest that all 600,000 of those Israelites should have been cut off on the ninth day of their life, not even waiting until they made it to Palestine. Or, we could plumb even greater depths of absurdity and foresee the elders of a village hovering like vultures waiting to snatch a child on Day 9, minute 1 if it wasn't circumcised. We're also forced to see a scenario in which a person who doesn't want to be circumcised, but is bound and gagged and forced to get it done, is A-OK on covenant terms with Yahweh even if he hates Yahweh's guts. That's how Skeptic X's former Church of Christ legalism sees things, but here again we will bring the point that no ancient law code was ever regarded in the way certain "fundamentalists" (of whom, Skeptic X is still one) believe. We repeat a passage we have often used, and will continue to use, from Hillers' Covenant: The History of a Biblical Idea:

..(T)here is no evidence that any collection of Near Eastern laws functioned as a written code that was applied by a strict method of exegesis to individual cases. As far as we can tell, these bodies of laws served educational purposes and gave expression to what was regarded as just in typical cases, but they left considerable latitude to local courts for determining the right in individual suits. They aided local courts without controlling them.

"Considerable latitude" suggests that if someone was not circumcised due to parental neglect, or there was some other circumstance stopping circumcision (in the case of Josh. 5, rampant disobedience by parents), they would not just be given the axe the whole way on Day 9, second 1, no questions asked and no credit given. We expect Till to provide his usual sort of non-reply ("no amount of flapdoodle about 'educational purposes' or 'typical cases' will change what the text says") but he certainly will provide no depth examination of ancient Near Eastern law codes and their application, from the period of Hammurabi up until the rabbinic era, and will certainly continue to play the role of the "fundamentalist Skeptic" who assumes that the hermeneutic he was taught as a Church of Christ minister is the only valid interpretive option and the very one that was in mind when the text was written. Doing hard research with actual answers isn't as much fun as saying the word "flapdoodle" several times and also does not get you the cheap laughs you need to impress and sway other skeptics.

And now to "cut off" at the pass. The word for "cut off" in Gen. 17:14 is (WARNING: Though I use Strong's as a source, this means I know Hebrew better than 10,000 Hebrew scholars) karath. Let's see what this is about, using instances of the word from Genesis to the Samuels:

772. karath, kaw-rath'; a prim. root; to cut (off, down or asunder); by impl. to destroy or consume; spec. to covenant (i.e. make an alliance or bargain, orig. by cutting flesh and passing between the pieces):--be chewed, be con- [feder-] ate, covenant, cut (down, off), destroy, fail, feller, be freed, hew (down), make a league ([covenant]), X lose, perish, X utterly, X want.

It is clear just from this that "cut off" would be able to carry a figurative meaning of "kill". But is also is obviously not the exclusive meaning:

In the same day the LORD made a covenant with Abram, saying, Unto thy seed have I given this land, from the river of Egypt unto the great river, the river Euphrates...

The meaning here, if we may be anachronistic, is along the lines of "cut a deal" -- and alludes to the "cut" animals in the prior verses that signified working out of the covenant. (See also Gen. 21;27, 32; 26:28; 31:44; Ex. 23:32, 24:8, 34:10-27; Deut. 5:2-3, 7:2, 9:9, 29:12-25, 31:16; Josh. 9:6-23, 24:25; Judg. 2:2; 1 Sam. 11:1-2, 18:3, 20:16, 22:8, 23:18)

And can it indicate death or non-existence? It can indeed, quite clearly:

Gen. 41:36 And that food shall be for store to the land against the seven years of famine, which shall be in the land of Egypt; that the land perish not through the famine.

It also means your normal slice and dice job:

Ex. 4:25 Then Zipporah took a sharp stone, and cut off the foreskin of her son, and cast it at his feet, and said, Surely a bloody husband art thou to me.

But then there are the class of cites like Gen. 17:14 which speak of a person being "cut off" from Israel:

Ex. 12:15 Seven days shall ye eat unleavened bread; even the first day ye shall put away leaven out of your houses: for whosoever eateth leavened bread from the first day until the seventh day, that soul shall be cut off from Israel. (See also Ex. 12:19, 30:33, 38; 31:14; Lev. 7:20-7, 17:4-14, 18:29, 19:8, 20:3-18; 22:3 [from the Lord's "presence"]; 23:29; Num. 4:18, 9:13, 15:30-1; 19:13, 20)

Karath is a word of some obvious complexity (with reference especially to non-scholars like Skeptic X who would lay up some simplistic grappo about "homographs" as an answer) so we feel to sufficient to tie off the matter with the comments of a real scholar, and one at that who has no bones to grind for inerrancy. Jacob Milgrom in his JPS commentary for Numbers synthesizes and examine the uses of karath and comes to the conclusion that its primary defining point is that it is a punishment "executed solely by deity". By Milgrom's reckoning karath means either extirpation or death - one may be "cut off" by either means, but God is the one who exacts the punishment of karath, and decides when to do it, and how. God punishes the soul with karath even as men punish the body by their own means.

It is therefore clear that Skeptic X cannot simply and arbitrarily claim that the persons referenced in Gen. 17:14 are to be executed. And if he wishes to take the bait on this, he is advised that we will return any reply with the full analysis offered by Milgrom. We'll see how Skeptic X fares against a scholar of such caliber. Based on the past record, he's not doing well when it comes to such confrontations.