What Abraham's Debt for a Circumcision Says About Covenants

A ruling buried in the Midrash Tanchuma, compiled in the fifth century CE, sounds extreme the first time you hear it: a man should go into debt rather than fail to make the day of his son’s circumcision a day of rejoicing. Not cut costs. Not do it simply and move on. Go into debt if necessary, and celebrate.

The rabbi behind the ruling is Rabbi Hunya, and he is building on a verse from Leviticus (12:3): “And on the eighth day the flesh of his foreskin shall be circumcised.” From that verse he extracts a principle about what it means to honor a covenant that was given at enormous cost.

The Context: Abraham After Sarah

The parsha is Chayei Sara, the portion that opens with Abraham old and blessed in everything (Genesis 24:1), having just buried Sarah. The Tanchuma arrives at the circumcision ruling through the verse “And Abraham took another wife” (Genesis 25:1) and the psalm it reads alongside it: “But as for me, I will hope continually and will praise Thee, yet more and more” (Psalms 71:14). The praise of a man who has buried his wife and then gotten up and kept going, kept fathering children, kept marking each new life with the covenant’s sign.

Praise that does not diminish. It increases. Every subsequent child was another circumcision, another inscription of the covenant on a new body, another act of covenantal persistence.

Solomon as Counterpoint

The Tanchuma illustrates this theme with a sharp parallel: Solomon. When Solomon was first crowned king, says Rabbi Yudan, he owned nothing. He was compelled to ride a donkey because the law warned against a king multiplying horses (Deuteronomy 17:16). He began small and poor. Later he became the wealthiest king in the ancient world. Later still he obtained exactly the horses the law had warned him against.

The Tanchuma does not resolve this. Solomon’s praise of God increased across his life; so did his deviation from covenantal terms. The pattern holds without a moral resolution: a life can contain genuine increase and genuine failure, and neither cancels the other.

What the Debt Is Actually Paying For

The brit milah (בְּרִית מִילָה) is not an observance that can be scaled to your current budget. It is the physical inscription of the covenant itself, the sign God placed on Abraham’s body and commanded him to place on every male descendant (Genesis 17:10-11). A sign costs something. The traditions about Abraham’s own hesitation before his circumcision are memorable: he was ninety-nine years old, and he delayed because he knew what the mark would mean. It would make his difference from the surrounding world permanent and visible. He went through with it. The cost was the point.

When Rabbi Hunya rules that a man should go into debt rather than scrimp on the celebration, he is not legislating lavish parties. He is encoding this principle: the ceremony should cost more than you comfortably have because the covenant cost Abraham more than he comfortably had. You calibrate your investment in the sign to the actual weight of what the sign represents. Anything less is treating the covenant as cheaper than it was.

What Abraham Said to God

The Tanchuma then gives Abraham’s own words, the words that stand behind “Abraham took another wife.” He said to God: “You told me that through Isaac my seed would be called (Genesis 21:12). You have multiplied Your blessings upon me, and I have borne many sons.” Hence he took another wife. Hence he kept going, kept fathering, kept marking each birth with the covenant’s sign.

The traditions about Keturah, the woman Abraham married after Sarah’s death, remember her as a woman of significant lineage. Through her Abraham fathered six more sons. Each birth was another moment when the covenant was inscribed on a new body, another celebration, another day when the debt of belonging was acknowledged and paid.

The Midrash Tanchuma’s ruling about debt encodes something real about what covenants demand. They do not ask for what you have comfortably available. They ask for more than that, because they represent something that cost more than comfort to receive. Abraham paid in pain and in the willingness to be marked as different. His descendants are asked to pay in the currency they have: time, preparation, celebration, the insistence that this day cost something.

The debt is how you show that you know what it was worth.

The Midrash Tanchuma’s ruling emerges from a deeply held principle about the nature of covenants: they are not contracts with fixed terms that can be fulfilled at whatever cost is convenient. They are relationships that ask for everything you have, and then a little more. Abraham gave that. He circumcised himself at ninety-nine. He sent Ishmael away when Sarah asked. He bound Isaac on the altar when God asked. He buried Sarah and then took another wife and fathered six more sons, each birth another act of covenantal persistence. Rabbi Hunya’s ruling about going into debt to celebrate a circumcision is not an extreme position. It is the logical extension of what Abraham modeled: you give to the covenant what the covenant is actually worth, not what you can comfortably afford. The celebration should stretch you because the sign it celebrates stretched Abraham to the edge of everything he had.