Why Abraham Went Into Debt for a Circumcision

There is a Jewish legal ruling buried inside the Midrash Tanchuma that 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 scrimp on it. Not do it quietly. Go into debt if necessary, and celebrate.

The rabbi who says this in the fifth-century CE Tanchuma 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 single verse he extracts a principle about what covenants require of the people who receive them.

The context is Abraham. He has just buried Sarah and is now described as old and blessed in everything (Genesis 24:1). The parsha is Chayei Sara, the life of Sarah, but the Tanchuma leaps from her death to the question of what came after: Abraham took a new wife, fathered more children, kept going. And the psalm that the midrash reads alongside this: “But as for me, I will hope continually and will praise Thee, yet more and more” (Psalms 71:14).

Praise that doesn’t diminish. It increases.

The Tanchuma illustrates this with a surprising parallel: Solomon. When Solomon was first crowned king of Israel, he owned nothing. He was compelled to ride on a donkey, says Rabbi Yudan, because the law warned against a king multiplying horses to himself (Deuteronomy 17:16). He started from nothing. Later he accumulated vast wealth. Later still he obtained “numerous horses” — exactly what the law had warned him not to do. His praise increased; so did his deviation from the covenant’s terms. The Tanchuma holds both things in tension without resolving them.

But it is the circumcision ruling that carries the sharpest edge. Go into debt. The logic is covenantal, not merely celebratory. The brit milah (בְּרִית מִילָה), the covenant of circumcision, is the sign God placed on Abraham’s body and commanded him to place on every male descendant. It is not an optional observance. It is the physical inscription of the covenant itself.

The traditions about Abraham’s own hesitation before his circumcision are striking: he delayed because he knew what the mark would mean. It would set him apart forever, make his difference from the surrounding world legible on his body. He was ninety-nine years old. He went through with it anyway.

The Midrash Tanchuma’s ruling that a man should go into debt to celebrate this covenant is not about lavish parties. It is about what it means to receive a sign. A sign costs something. Abraham paid in pain. His descendants are asked to pay in the currency they have: time, preparation, expense, the willingness to make the day visible as a day worth marking.

The Tanchuma then quotes Abraham’s own words 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, it says, Abraham took another wife.

The praise increased and so did the family. The covenant kept bearing fruit long after the ceremony. That is what the debt is for: not the party, but the insistence that what happened that day mattered enough to cost something.

The traditions about Keturah, the woman Abraham married after Sarah’s death, remember her as a woman of significant lineage. Abraham celebrated every birth that followed. He went on giving the covenant’s sign to his sons, generation after generation.

Rabbi Hunya’s ruling survives because it encodes something true about what it means to belong to a covenant: it asks more of you than you might have on hand. You give it anyway.