It being considered of the utmost importance that all who claimed the advantages in the Jewish commonwealth accruing only to the legal, though nominal, 'children of Abraham,' should really be of divine lineage, security must be had against Isaac having any full brother. It might be that in after time some natural son of Sara might claim to be the one born of divine parentage, might carry on the Jewish commonwealth, slay the children of Jehovah by Sara, and so end the divine lineage with the authority it carried. Careful precautions having been taken that Ishmael should be an 'irreconcilable,' there is reason to suspect that the position of Isaac as Jehovah's 'only-begotten son' was secured by means obscurely hinted in the circumcision first undergone by Abraham, and made the sign of the covenant. That circumcision, wheresoever it has survived, is the relic of a more horrible practice of barbarian asceticism, is hardly doubtful; that the original rite was believed to have been that by which Abraham fulfilled his contract with Jehovah, appears to me intimated in various passages of the narrative which have survived editorial arrangement in accordance with another view. For instance, the vast inducements offered Abraham, and the great horror that fell on the patriarch, appear hardly explicable on the theory that nothing was conceded on Abraham's side beyond the surrender of a wife whom he had freely consigned to earthly monarchs. Though the suspicion just expressed as to the nature of Abraham's circumcision may be doubted, it is not questionable that the rite of circumcision bears a significance in rabbinical traditions and Jewish usages which renders its initiation by Abraham at least a symbol of marital renunciation. Thus, the custom of placing in a room where the rite of circumcision was performed a pot of dust, was explained by the rabbins to have reference to the dust which Jehovah declared should be the serpent's food. [38] That circumcision should have been traditionally associated with the temptation of Eve is a confirmation of the interpretation which regards her (Eve) as the prototype of Sara and the serpent as sexual desire. Although, if the original sense of Abraham's circumcision were what has been suggested, it had been overlaid, when the Book of Genesis in its present form was compiled, by different traditions, and that patriarch is described as having married again and had other children, the superior sanctity of Sara's son was preserved. Indeed, there would seem to have continued for a long time a tradition that the Abrahamic line and covenant were to be carried out by 'the seed of the woman' alone, and the paternity of Jehovah. Like Sara, Rebekah is sterile, and after her Rachel; the birth of Jacob and Esau from one, and of Joseph and Benjamin from the other, being through the intervention of Jehovah.