Joshua 5:4-7

Jos. 5:4-7. Concerning their not circumcising the children, that were born in the wilderness. Considering the plainness of the precept of circumcision and the strictness of the injunction, and that no great stress was laid upon it, and that it was so expressly commanded that no uncircumcised person should eat of the Passover, which was with great strictness and often commands required most watchfully and diligently and without fail to be kept every year, and considering that the congregation in the wilderness was under Moses's government, - I say, considering these things, it is unaccountable that all the children that were born for thirty-eight years together should not be circumcised, unless it was omitted by Divine direction. Some think God favorably dispensed with the omission on consideration of the unsettledness of their state and their frequent removes, and that stirring the children might be dangerous to them while they were sore. This reason is generally acquiesced in, but does not seem to be satisfactory. For sometimes they stayed a year in a place (Numbers 9:22), if not much longer, and in their removes their little children though sore might be wrapped so warm and carried so easy as to receive no damage, and might certainly be much better accommodated than the mothers in travail or lying in. Therefore it rather seems to have been a continued token of God's displeasure against them. Circumcision was originally a seal of the promise of the land of Canaan. But when God had sworn in His wrath concerning the men of war that came out of Egypt that they should be consumed in the wilderness and never enter Canaan, as that sentence is here repeated (verse 6), relation being thereunto had (it seems to be here brought in as giving the reason of the omission). As a further ratification of that sentence, and to be a constant memorandum of it to them, all that fell under that sentence and were to fall by it were forbidden to circumcise their children; (or rather, I should think, Moses, as the prophet of God, immediately under the Divine direction, was restrained from putting them upon it, was ordered to let them alone and leave them to their own negligent and disobedient hearts in this affair). "This was such a significant indication of God's wrath as the breaking of the tables of the Covenant was, when Israel had broke Covenant by making the golden calf," [Henry.] It is probably they who generally omitted keeping the Passover from the pronouncing of the sentence in Numbers 14, until now; for they never would have been tolerated in keeping the Passover from year to year in uncircumcision. The keeping of the Passover here seems to be mentioned as being now a new thing among them as well as circumcision. This gives light unto what is said in verse 9. God suffering them judicially to continue in uncircumcision for so long a time like the Egyptians, where their fathers for a long time had many of them lived in uncircumcision for their hankering after Egypt, and going about to make them a captain to return to Egypt, was a continuing of them under the reproach of Egypt, which reproach was now rolled away. Moses had told them, while they were in the plains of Moab (Deuteronomy 12:8), that when they came into the land of Canaan they should not do as they did then, every man what was right in his own eyes, which confirms that the omission of circumcision, the Passover, and other Divine institutions, was not from a Divine prohibition, but rather from a judicial leaving them to themselves (Amos 5:25).