“Circumcision was originally a seal of the promise of the land of Canaan... It was in the believing hope of that good land that the patriarchs circumcised their children; but when God had sworn in his wrath concerning the men who came out of Egypt that they should be consumed in the wilderness, and never enter Canaan, nor come within sight of it, as a further ratification of that sentence, and to be a constant memorandum of it to them, all that fell under that sentence, and were to fall by it, were forbidden to circumcise their children, by which they were plainly told that, whatever others might, they should never have the benefit of that promise of which circumcision was the seal.” -Matthew Henry