Sarah

Sarah is the wife of Abraham and the mother of Isaac in Genesis, also called Sarai in the earlier narrative and Sara in Latin and traditional English forms. Scripture first introduces her as Sarai, Terah’s daughter-in-law and Abram’s wife, when Terah takes Abram, Lot, and Sarai from Ur of the Chaldees toward Canaan and they settle in Haran (Genesis 11:31). Linguistically, Sarai and Sarah are variant forms of the same Hebrew name; Sara is a later Latin and traditional English rendering.

God promises Abraham that he will bless Sarah and give him a son by her, making her a mother of nations from whom kings will come (Genesis 17:16). When Abraham hears this at one hundred years old and considers Sarah at ninety, he laughs and asks whether a child can be born to them (Genesis 17:17). God answers that Sarah will bear a son named Isaac and that the covenant will be established with him for an everlasting covenant after him (Genesis 17:19). The promise is repeated at the tent: Sarah will have a son at the set time, and nothing is too hard for Yahweh (Genesis 18:10, 18:14). Scripture records its fulfillment when Sarah conceives and bears Abraham a son in his old age at the time God had spoken (Genesis 21:2). Isaiah later recalls Sarah as the ancestral mother who bore Israel (Isaiah 51:2).

The New Testament treats Sarah as an example of faith. Hebrews says that by faith Sarah herself received power to conceive when she was past age, because she counted faithful the one who had promised (Hebrews 11:11). First Peter names her among the holy women who hoped in God and says that Sarah obeyed Abraham, calling him lord, and that Christian wives may become her children if they do good and are not frightened by terror (1 Peter 3:5-6). The same passage places her obedience within an exhortation about wives’ adornment and subjection to their husbands (1 Peter 3:5).

Christian traditions read Sarah’s significance differently. Some emphasize the model of trusting faith in Hebrews 11:11 and the promise narrative; others emphasize 1 Peter 3:5-6 as a pattern of wifely submission and obedience, while still others treat that instruction as shaped by its first-century household setting and not as a universal rule. Catholic and Orthodox traditions also honor Sarah as a matriarch and saint, whereas various Protestant readings focus on her as a recipient of promise and an example of faith. These are confessional and interpretive differences about how to apply the texts, not disagreements over what the texts say.

AI-generated reference entry, grounded in the passages where this term appears — history and Scripture stated as such, interpretation labeled as interpretation. Not a substitute for the text itself.