VAYIKRA

And [He] called

27 Ye shall not round the corners of your heads, neither shalt thou mar the corners of thy beard.

Why Israelites were Forbidden to Shave

"From the singular account Herodotus gives of the worship and costume of the Arabians of Jenysus, it seems they must have been an isolated remnant of the Emim. They worshipped Dionysus (Osiris) under the name of Orotal, and Urania (Astarte under the name of Alilat; and "cut away their hair all round, shaving it off the temples;" assigning as a reason for this practice, that their god was so shaved.

Now it is a peculiarity of national costume, which I have found without an exception, characteristic of all those monumental people whom I have been able to trace to the Rephaim by means of their cities and names—that they all shave some part of the head, or beard, or both; and though each tribe does this after a fashion of its own, yet, in one particular, they all agree; they all shave the temples and side of the beard. Their Aramean and Horite-Edomite dependants, and their Amorite neighbours, on the contrary, always appear with their beard entire, and their hair long and carefully trimmed.

We further learn from the Egyptian sculptures, that the particular practice of "cutting away the hair all round, and shaving it off the temples," was characteristic of the Shet-ta. Among the chiefs represented as hastening in magnificently accoutred war-chariots, to aid the city Atesh against Rameses II., some are conspicuous by a coiffure corresponding with remarkable exactitude to the above description.

None of their hair is left but a round patch on the top of the skull; and that is tied up into a tuft, like the scalp-lock of an American Indian, or twisted into a long plaited braid, like a Chinese pigtail. If this be the way the god Orotal used to shave for a pattern, we cannot commend his taste; but the pious reverence of the Amalekites for the divine origin of this hideous fashion probably led them to think it very becoming.

The head attire of the Shet-ta of Atesh in the battle-scene of Seti-Menephtah, at Harnak, and that of the captive chief in the symbolical group of that king devoting his enemies to destruction, presents a striking contrast to the one described above; and there, the intention of imitating the coiffure of their god is manifest, by comparing it with the effigies of Astarte on some of their sacred utensils.

They wore a long thick braid of hair, on each side of the face, behind the ear; and the back hair is long, hanging down like that of a woman; it may perhaps be, to follow up this strange religious manifestation, that they shaved their beards, or clipped it exeedingly short. While other branches of the Rapha nation proclaimed their allegiance to the tutelar god of their land, by the crest of their helmets, the Shet-ta carried out the same idea by their mode of tonsure, as they wore no helmets.

If we now bear in mind that it was in the land of this people that the children of Israel spent thirty-eight years of probation, in the great and terrible wilderness of Paran and Sir, in constant communication with the Edomite and Midianite tribes domesticated among them, we shall then apprehend the full significance of the prohibition given in Lev. 19:27, in terms precisely equivalent to those by which Herodotus describes the practice of their descendants, the Jenysite Arabians.

"Ye shall not round off the corners of your heads, neither shall ye destroy the corners of your beards."

Since this practice, as explained by Herodotus, and confirmed by the religious badges and emblems depicted on the Egyptian sculptures, was a distinctive outward token of this idolatrous people's worship and nationality, its adoption, by an Israelite, would of course be regarded as equivalent to an open declaration of religious and national apostacy."

—Journal of Sacred Literature, pp. 65, 66.

Herald of the Kingdom and Age to Come, May 1853