Origin of Circumcising - short version

I think circumcising originated as a method of helping to CREATE AGRICULTURAL SLAVES, during the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture to slave agriculture in the middle east. An early farmer's limiting factor as to how much food s/he can produce is not usually water, or land, or seeds, or sunshine. Once they understand how to farm, their limiting factor is THEMSELVES. Their own BODIES. HUMAN LABOR.

I think early farmers, facing hunter-gatherers hunting and gathering in their farm fields at first regarded these people as agricultural pests, and killed them whenever they could.

Then they must have realized their mistake. Dead people can't work the fields.

So the next step is to capture them instead of kill them, intending to make field hands out of them - slaves.

Actually catching one, though, presents new sets of problems. How do you force a wild man to do what you tell him to? How does one man most clearly and effectively establish dominance over another?

How about total castration? Wouldn't that do it? If one guy cuts off another's penis and testicles, who's dominant? Not the guy with his dick cut off, I'll tell you that.

There are three primary problems with total castration as a method of making useful agricultural slaves.

1) It kills too many. They bleed to death or die of infection.

2) Those who survive can't reproduce. When they do die you have to go out and catch and castrate and train more. And

3) the ones who survive aren't the LEAST bit interested in doing what you tell them to. All they want to do is kill you. You would have been ahead of the game by killing them in the first place. The whole castration thing was a complete waste of time, something a primitive farmer can't afford.

Circumcision was the logical solution to all three problems.

1) Not as many died. Some still did, but not nearly as many.

2) The survivors CAN still reproduce, thus the adult slaves make new ones readily. No need to go out and find new slaves when you can make all you want at home. (And the mutilation DOES very nicely differentiate the slaves from the real people.)

3) Most importantly, the circumcision leaves the slave with something left to lose. Instead of changing him into an enraged, uncontrollable eunuch, you make him into a cowed coward. (Cow-herd?) He KNOWS what you'll do to him if he DOESN'T do what you say; come back for the rest.

It is only much later that religious mythology gets built up around what was originally developed and well known to all involved as a method of converting wild populations of independent hunter-gatherer groups into agricultural slaves.

The disaster gets explained in the first generation of slave groups as "It must have been God's will", and then later as "It must have been God's will and command", and finally as "God commanded circumcision" blah blah blah.

Circumcision was discovered as an effective technique in the economically "necessary" effort to make agricultural slaves. The marking was a side benefit. It marks you as inferior, dominated, a slave. After enough generations of it the slave cultures end up doing it to themselves, and rationalizing it with "religion", even after the "master race" has long since died out and left the scene.

Circumcision is the primary evidence of and the primary human artifact still remaining from the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture to slave agriculture in the middle east maybe 10 thousand to 6 thousand years ago.