My Circumcision Theory
so in Ægypt & nearby lands at such a time, it was practice to chop off some member of enemies' corpses as a monument to triumph and to tally the slain. you see this on the Narmer Palette with heads; ears and hands were also used, which would have been easier to deal with than whole heads. but the Hebrews would also use foreskins for this purpose, as when Saul orders David to bring him two hundred Philistine foreskins.
probably the taking of foreskins was likewise an easier stylisation of taking the enemies' phalli whole; the symbolism there is hard to miss.
so for a Hebrew wye, the loss of the foreskin would be the greatest humiliation & submission possible- not only did the enemy kill you, they vanquished your whole army such as to be able to methodically violate your corpses like this. but what if the enemy couldn't do this?
recall the actual meaning of sacrifice- to make sacred to a god, that is, to remove it from the human economy and bequeath it to the god's estate. by sacrificing their own foreskins to the war-god IHVH, the Hebrews would accomplish several things, which are all the same thing framed from several angles from our deprived atheist viewpoint:
they would submit themselves utterly, not most shamefully to mortal men, but to the Lord of Hosts, to whom abjection is no dishonor.
they would deprive their enemy of the chance to collect the trophies or number their dead in the customary way. the Hebrew is ritually already dead, or, to say the same thing, Herclitan, the Hebrew is immortal.
by rendering themselves part of IHVH's treasure-horde, they secure his jealousy & wardenship in their favour.
a good comparand is how the Norse would cut themselves with speartips to devote themselves to Woden and ensure entrance to Walhall. I of course hold that Woden & IHVH are the same god (and Ba'al Hadad is Thunder).
