To this the Christian had several replies. Circumcision was merely given for a sign, as is shown by the fact that a woman cannot receive it, "for God has made women as well able as men to do what is just and right." There is no righteousness in being of one sex rather than of the other.[32] Circumcision then was imposed upon the Jews "to mark you off from the rest of the nations and from us, that you alone might suffer what now you are suffering, and so deservedly suffering--that your lands should be desolate and your cities burnt with fire, that strangers should eat your fruits before your faces, and none of you set his foot in Jerusalem. For in nothing are you known from other men apart from the circumcision of your flesh. None of you, I suppose, will venture to say that God did not foresee what should come to pass. And it is all deserved; for you slew the Righteous one and his prophets before him; and now you reject and dishonour--so far as you can--those who set their hopes on him and on the Almighty God, maker of all things, who sent him; and in your synagogues you curse those who believe on Christ."[33] The Sabbath was given to remind the Jews of God; and restrictions were laid on certain foods because of the Jewish proclivity to forsake the knowledge of God.[34] In general, all these commands were called for by the sins of Israel,[35] they were signs of judgment. On the other hand the so-called Barnabas maintains that the Jews never had understood their law at all. Fasts, feasts {181} and sacrifices were prescribed, not literally, but in a spiritual sense which the Jews had missed. The taboos on meats were not prohibitions of the flesh of weasels, hares and hyaenas and so forth, but were allegoric warnings against fleshly lusts, to which ancient zoologists and modern Arabs have supposed these animals to be prone.[36] Circumcision was meant, as the prophets showed, to be that of the heart; evil daemons had misled the Jews into practising it upon the flesh.[37] The whole Jewish dispensation was a riddle, and of no value, unless it is understood as signifying Christianity.