Should any rational person believe that male circumcision is a covenant with God?

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The thing about covenants is that eventually the people that made them forgot what they were and why. It’s an aspiration to something that lasts forever. But people can’t help but forget.

The ending of the line of Davidic kings is a perfect illustration of this. David lived so strongly with God, God could chastise him and he would accept it and so deepen his covenant with God. God promised both Israel, and David, that his dynasty would last forever.

The problem with forever is that while God never forgets, we do. God waited until his people fell so far from grace that there was no redemption even remotely possible, then He delivered the Israelites into the hands of the Babylonians using Jeremiah as his messenger. It wasn’t God that broke the covenant, it was us.

This is a running theme in scripture. God trying many, many, many different ways to make a covenant with the people of the world that will last. The fact that it never does can’t be attributable to Him, only to us. This is shown over and over and over in the Bible.

Wikipedia tells us that circumcision did not become popular in the Anglophone (English-speaking) world until the late 19th century, it was recommended by doctors as a deterrent to masturbation. Masturbation was seen as a vehicle for disease.

I doubt the ancient covenant with God that the book of Leviticus described with the Jews, long, long, long forgotten, replaced with the covenant with God that the gospels described, which we can describe is currently in the process of being forgotten, had any role whatsoever in the widespread modern practice of genital mutilation.