covenant rainbow and the penis he thought was his own

[Doug Millison]

"After the biblical flood, and despite his reassuring vow never to 
destroy the world again, God retains a radical and ominous 
creative/destructive ambivalence. But if God's fusion of the 
personalities of creator and destroyer has consequences for his 
character, it also has consequences for the plot of the Bible. What 
the divine rejection of, on the one hand, unchecked human fertility 
and, on the other, any further destruction of the world, contibutes 
to the plot is a compromise:  a reproductive covenant with one part 
of mankind. Fertility is still promised, but it is not promised to 
mankind as a whole. Instead, it is promised exclusively or at least 
preeminently to Abraham and his descendants, and even this restricted 
fertility is not Abraham's sovereign possession. It is now a power 
exercised only in conjunction with God. In this new order, God's 
intervention permits Abraham and Sarah, yes, to conceive and bear in 
their old age, but Abraham's penis is no longer his own possession. 
As circumcision so well symbolizes, the organ and the power behind it 
now belong partly to God."
--Jack Miles, _God: A Biography_
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