God Will Circumcise Your Heart for the Sake of Your Life (Deut. 30: 6)

The Deuteronomist says:

And YHWH your God will circumcise your heart and the heart of your seed to love YHWH your God with all your heart and all your soul, for the sake ha'ye'kha, of your life (30: 6).

Jeremiah uses similar language:

Hi'mo'lu, circumcise yourselves, and remove or'lot, the foreskins, of your hearts (Jer. 4: 4).

In 10: 16 the Deuteronomist tells the Israelites to circumcise their own hearts:

U'mal'tem, and you shall circumcise, or'lat, the foreskin of, your hearts and stiffen your necks no more (10: 16).

        Whereas in Genesis God tells Abraham that any of his descendants who do not circumcise their foreskins will be excised and die the Deuteronomist says that they must circumcise the foreskin of their hearts but adds that there will come a time when God will do this for them.

        The word ha'ye'kha, your life, has the root ha'yah, live, which appears seven times in this chapter (30: 6, 15, 16, 19 [3], 20). The chapter is a prescription for life, as is emphasized in 30: 15-20. It is interesting that the Deuteronomist relates the life of the Israelite to the circumcision of his heart by God because the penalty for failure to fulfil the commandment of physical circumcision is excision:

And an a'reyl, foreskinned man, male, who does not circumcise the flesh or'la'to, of his

foreskin, his flesh w'nikh'r'ta, should be cut off, from his people; he has broken My covenant

(Gen. 17: 14).

The physical circumcision that God commands Abraham in Genesis and the spiritual circumcision of which the Deuteronomist speaks have a similar relationship to life. God will excise the life of a person who fails to circumcise himself and extend the life of a person who circumcises his heart or whose heart is circumcised by God.