Step 9 of the Abrahamic Covenant:
Plant a Memorial
And ye shall circumcise the flesh of your foreskin; and it shall be a token of the covenant betwixt me and you.
Genesis 17:11
The final step of the covenant ritual was to establish some sort of memorial. This was to remind themselves and others of this covenant. The covenant partners may have planted a tree sprinkled with the blood of the animal, but there were other types of memorials also.
God called the circumcision ‘a token of the covenant.’ This particular memorial was one that the men carried on their bodies their whole lives.
There are other memorials to various covenants throughout the Bible: Abraham planted a tree (Genesis 21:32); Jacob raised a pillar of rocks (Genesis 31:43-54); Joshua put up a cairn of rocks taken from the Jordan River bed (Joshua 4:20); and Jesus planted a cross and drenched it with his blood.
Whenever you read of an altar, or a pile of stones, or a tree being planted, you can surmise that a covenant ceremony has taken place.
Now therefore, come thou, let us make a covenant, I and thou; and let it be for a witness between me and thee. And Jacob took a stone, and set it up for a pillar. Genesis 31:44-45
Thus they made a covenant at Beersheba: then Abimelech rose up, and Phil the chief captain of his host, and they returned into the land of the Philistines. And Abraham planted a grove in Beersheba, and called there on the name of the Lord, the everlasting God. Genesis 21:32-33
Most covenant ceremonies probably lasted no more than a day or two in order to fulfill all of the requirements. However, the covenant between Abraham and God, which began in Genesis 15, took centuries to finish. You can find pieces of it all over the Old Testament as people either fulfilled parts of it, or they prophesied about its fulfillment, or they wished for it to be fulfilled.
References:
The Holy Bible: King James Version
The Miracle of the Scarlet Thread by Richard Booker
©2025 Chandra Hronchek