The Torah commands that when a Jewish boy is born, he should be circumcised on the eighth day (Lev. 12:3). The verb used in that passage to denote “circumcising” the child is yimol, and similar words for the act of “circumcising” appear approximately 30 times in the Bible, mostly in the Books of Genesis (Gen. 17, 21:4, 34:15–22), Exodus (Ex. 12:48, 12:44), and Joshua (Josh. 5). Those words are derived from the root MEM-(VAV)-LAMMED, as is the word milah in the phrase Brit Milah. That said, this essay focuses not on the act of “circumcision,” but on the person performing that act — the “circumcisor.” In this essay, we will explore several terms used to denote the “circumcisor,” namely, mohel, gozer, umana, and rofeh. In doing so, we will trace the etymologies of these various terms and attempt to show how they differ from one another.

The most common term in use nowadays for a practitioner of circumcision is mohel. While the term mohel does not appear in the Bible or the Mishnah, an Aramaic form of this word already appears in the Babylonian Talmud: The Talmud (Shabbat 156a) states that while a person born under the astrological influence of Mars (the Red Planet) may be destined to serve in an occupation where he will shed blood, the individual himself retains the freewill to decide whether this means he will be a professional bloodletter (umana), robber, butcher, or circumcisor (mohala). Cognates of the word mohel appear twice in the Mishnah (Shabbat 19:2, 19:5) in reference to the act of circumcision (mohalin).

It is tempting to say that the words mohel and mohalin derives from the same Biblical root MEM-(VAV)-LAMMED as the Biblical verbs for “circumcising” mentioned above. However, this is somewhat problematic because mohel has an extra HEY that seems to be part of the root, while the Biblical root has no HEY in the middle. The presence of this extra HEY suggests that the root of mohel is actually MEM-HEY-LAMMED, not MEM-(VAV)-LAMMED. [Interestingly, in one case the Mishnah uses the more abbreviated verb mal (Shabbat 19:6) to denote “circumcising.” That word actually appears already in the Bible (Deut. 30:6, Josh. 5:4, 5:7), and does not have the elusive HEY that we are discussing. I do not know why this particular Mishnah uses a different verb for “circumcising.”]

Indeed, it has already been pointed out by scholars that the HEY in the word mohel is not part of the original Biblical Hebrew root for “circumcising,” but is rather a new feature of Rabbinic Hebrew. This point is made at great length by the Maskillic scholar Solomon Dubno (1738-1813) in his work Tikkun Sofrim (to Gen. 17:13, printed in Netivot HaShalom alongside Moses Mendelssohn’s Beiur). According to his understanding, the two roots MEM-(VAV)-LAMMED and MEM-HEY-LAMMED simply exist in two different strands of the Hebrew language.

But there is another approach which bridges the gap between these two roots and sees them as interrelated. Even though I already mentioned that cognates of mohel in the sense “circumcising” do not appear in the Bible, the root MEM-HEY-LAMMED does appear once in the Bible in a context that seemingly has nothing to do with circumcision.........

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