여호수아 5:3의 인용 해설

“When [the day] blows gently” [2:17]. The Tanhuma writes that this verse also applies to Abraham. It says concerning him, “as the day grew hot” [Genesis, 18:1]. The Holy One created a great heat in the world so that no guests would come.²¹Tanhuma, Vayera, 3. “At givat haaraloth”²²Lit., the mount of foreskins. [Joshua, 5:3]. This means that Abraham made a tall pile in his house of the foreskins from the many people that he had circumcised. He piled them, one on top of the other, in his house and a stream of blood flowed from these foreskins. The Holy One said to the angels: let us go to Abraham’s house to visit the sick. The angels said: Lord of the Universe, it stinks and it is quite repulsive in Abraham’s house, because of the foreskins. God said: in my eyes the smell of the foreskins is much better than the pleasant odors of all the incense, as the verse says, “I will betake me to the mount of myrrh” [4:6].²³Yalkut Shimoni, Song of Songs, Remez, 986.

אשר יצא לפניהם ONE WHO MAY GO BEFORE THEM — not as is the way of the kings of the nations who sit at home and send their armies to battle, but as “I” have done — I who fought against Sihon and against Og, as it is said, (Numbers 21:34) “Do not fear him: “[for I have delivered him into thy hand … and thou shall do to him as thou didst unto Sihon, etc.]” and as is the way that Joshua followed, as it is said, (Joshua 5:3) “And Joshua went to him and said, Art thou for us [or for our adversaries]”. And so, too, in the case of David, it says, (I Samuel 18:16) “For he went out and came in before them” — went out at their head, and came in at their head (Sifrei Bamidbar 139:2).

ותקח צפורה צור, “Tzipporah took hold of a sharp edged piece of stone, etc.” she took a kind of chisel, the same kind as has been described in the Book of Joshua (5,3) as חרבות צורים, the instrument used by Joshua when he circumcised all the Jews that had been born since the Jews had left Egypt who had not been circumcised in the desert because the climactic conditions would have posed a threat to the lives of the infants.