From human sacrifice to circumcision the transition is less violent than would at first sight appear. An intermediate type is found in the dedication of the first-born, where Jahweh seems to claim for himself, not as a victim, but as a slave and devotee, the first fruits of that increase which it is his peculiar function to ensure. In various laws, Jahweh lays claim to the first-born of man and beast,--sometimes to all, sometimes only to the male first-born. The animals were sacrificed; the sons, in later ages at least, were either made over as Nazarites or redeemed with an offering or a money-ransom. But we cannot doubt that in the earliest times the first-born child was slain before Jahweh. In the curious legend of Moses and Zipporah we get a strange folk-tale connecting this custom indirectly with the practice of circumcision. Jahweh seeks to kill Moses, apparently because he has not offered up his child: but Zipporah his wife takes a stone knife, circumcises her son, and flings the bloody offering at Jahweh’s feet, who thereupon lets her husband go. This, rather than the later account of its institution by Abraham, seems the true old explanatory legend of the origin of circumcision--a legend analogous to those which we find in Roman and other early history as embodying or explaining certain ancient customs or legal formulae. Circumcision, in fact, appears to be a bloody sacrifice to Jahweh, as the god of generation: a sacrifice essentially of the nature of a ransom, and therefore comparable to all those other bodily mutilations whose origin Mr. Herbert Spencer has so well shown in the _Ceremonial Institutions_. At the same time, the nature of the offering helps to cast light upon the character of Jahweh as a god of increase; exactly as the “emerods” with which the Philistines were afflicted for the capture of Jahweh and his ark show {201}the nature of the vengeance which might naturally be expected from a deity of generation.