“And he that is eight days old shall be circumcised among
you, every man child in your generations, he that is born in the house, or
bought with money of any stranger, which is not of thy seed.” Genesis
17:12
There is a legitimate scientific reason why circumcision is
safest for a male child on the eighth day after birth, but Moses could not
possibly have known or understood this fact. The science of Moses’ day was not sufficiently
advanced to have discovered this fact.
Those who believe the Bible account know that God led Moses to give this
instruction.
At birth, the infant’s immune system has just begun to work
and the child could not yet successfully fight off infection. Luckily, for the first week of life, the
child carries antibodies in his blood which have been provided by the
mother. The mother’s antibodies
begin to decline in number after one week,
The infant’s ability to form clots begins to develop about
day five and reaches its peak at day eight. If any surgery is to be performed, day eight would be the
ideal day. On day eight, the
infant is best able to prevent infection and to close and seal a surgical
wound. Moses could have only known
this in one of two ways: 1. Trial and error, with a large number of dead
babies, or 2. He was told.
The science behind this was not elucidated until the
Twentieth Century. In 1935, Dr.
Carl Peter Henrik Dam (1895 - 1976), while doing research on cholesterol
metabolism in baby chicks at the University of Copenhagen, discovered Vitamin
K, a vital factor in the coagulation mechanism. He initially called it the Koagulationsvitamin. He received the 1943 Nobel Prize for
Physiology or Medicine for his work on the subject.
The American pediatrician, Luther Emmett Holt (1855 – 1924)
discovered that infants were especially susceptible to bleeding on days two
through five, but had nearly 100% clotting ability by day eight.
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