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This is the word's settled, everyday meaning, and almost all of its uses carry it. To circumcise is to remove the foreskin, the small fold of skin at the tip of the male organ. In Israel this was no mere custom: God commanded it of Abraham and every male in his household as the physical mark of the covenant, performed on the eighth day after birth, and it became the line between an Israelite and an outsider.

From this concrete act the prophets and lawgivers drew a powerful picture. To say that a heart or an ear is "uncircumcised" was to say it is closed up, stubborn, unable to respond to God, the way the foreskin was felt to cover and obstruct. So the same word is used for cutting that barrier away from the heart, an inner change that makes a person truly open and loyal to God. The physical rite and the inner one are deliberately held together: the body could carry the sign while the heart stayed shut, which is exactly the charge the prophets press.

The two uses are one meaning, not two. Both are the single act of cutting away what covers and blocks, whether on the body as a covenant sign or on the heart as the reality that sign was always meant to point to.

A handful of poetic verses use a look-alike word that most lexicons treat as a different word entirely, sharing only the same spelling. Instead of the ritual cutting away of the foreskin, it carries a sense of cutting down, beating back, or wasting away.

The clearest case is Psalm 118, where the speaker, ringed by hostile nations, says he will "cut them off" or "beat them back" in the name of the LORD. The ancient translators understood it this way ("I warded them off"), and the warlike setting fits a word about driving enemies away, not about circumcising them. Two other verses use related forms for things that simply waste away: grass that flourishes in the morning and is withered by evening, and arrows that are blunted or snapped.

This second meaning is genuinely contested. A minority of scholars read the Psalm 118 lines as the ordinary word "circumcise," taken as a taunt against uncircumcised enemies. The withering and blunting verses are widely assigned to a neighboring root for "wither, cut off" that the standard numbering has folded in under this same entry.