The authors contend that the justification for ritual circumcision of newborn males based on hygiene is inadequate to explain the persistence of this ritual attack on the penis. They offer a textual analysis of six major passages concerning circumcision in the Hebrew Bible to supplant previous anthropological and clinical studies of this subject. Taken together, these passages contain a great number of references to displaced filicidal wishes, as well as “sexual and aggressive savagery.” They contend that narrative sequences can serve as an analog to free association in the clinical situation. Circumcision appears in those passages preceding and following accounts of fear of impending sexual or aggressive “chaos” in the family or from neighboring peoples.