foreskin: the fold of skin cut away in circumcision, and more broadly any natural covering that seals a thing off from the use it was made for
The plain sense is the fold of skin removed when a male is circumcised. Genesis 17 uses the word five times as God makes circumcision the sign of his covenant with Abraham's household, and the law later fixes the act on a baby's eighth day. Because what is cut away is a real object, it can be handled and counted: David paid a bride price of a hundred of them, and Joshua left a heap of them at a place afterward called the hill of the foreskins.
But Hebrew writers also used this word of things with no body at all. Behind every use is one picture: a covering that seals something shut and keeps it from doing what it was made to do.
- a heart so wrapped up that it cannot answer God
- the fruit of a newly planted tree, closed off and not to be eaten for three years
- a person still bearing the mark of an outsider to the covenant
The Leviticus fruit law is the clearest evidence that the word is not simply a term of anatomy. A tree has no foreskin, yet the law tells Israel to treat the young fruit as one. Most modern reference works therefore take the core idea to be something like "sealed off" or "off limits," with the body part as one settled use of that idea rather than the source of all the others.
The matching adjective (עָרֵל) describes the person or the body part that still has its covering, while this noun names the covering itself. The ordinary verb for taking it away is a different word (מוּל), which is why the two so often appear in the same sentence: you circumcise the foreskin.
Nuances
What ʿorlah means in Leviticus 19:23, where the law tells Israel to treat the fruit of a newly planted tree as its foreskin for three years.
- majorityThe root here carries its underlying sense of "closed off, blocked, off limits": the command bars the fruit from human use rather than identifying the fruit with a foreskin. The cognate accusative construction cannot mean "cut", since the Priestly writer had mul, gazar, karat, and batar available for that, and the ancient versions (LXX, Onqelos, Vulgate) all render it as removal or distancing.; Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus 17-22 (AB 3A; New York: Doubleday, 2000), 1677-1684; HALOT, s.v. ערלה
- minorityThe fruit itself is the tree's foreskin: young fruit is left uneaten on the tree exactly as a foreskin is left on an uncircumcised male, which makes this law the interpretive key to circumcision as a rite of consecrated fertility.; Howard Eilberg-Schwartz, The Savage in Judaism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 141-176, esp. 149-150
- minorityThe word here means "forbidden" or "tabu", integrating the law with the firstfruits principle that the opening produce of any life cycle belongs to YHWH and is released for human use only afterward.; Baruch A. Levine, Leviticus (JPS Torah Commentary; Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1989), ad loc.