English: “your little ones, your wives” — they too enter the covenant. This teaches that the covenant includes the minors and the women; you cannot say that only the adult males are parties to the covenant.
The explicit inclusion of children and women expands the covenantal community beyond the adult male heads of household.
Type of Learning
Custom (phrase-by-phrase or midrashic expansion of the verse).
What Is Learned
The midrash extracts concrete legal, historical or theological referents from the wording of the passuk, giving the brief biblical language a fuller operational meaning.