People of the Bible

Sarah

The patriarchs and matriarchs · Around 2000 BC (traditional) · Appears in Genesis 11 to 23 · Also known as Sarai

Sarah, first called Sarai, is the wife of Abraham and the mother of Isaac, the matriarch through whom God's covenant promise was carried. Barren into old age, she laughed when told she would bear a son, and when Isaac was born she said God had made her laugh. She is honored in the New Testament as a mother of the faithful.

And Sarah said, God hath made me to laugh, so that all that hear will laugh with me.Genesis 21:6 (KJV)

A pilgrim wife

Sarai left Ur of the Chaldees with her husband Abram and shared in the whole long pilgrimage of faith, leaving home and kindred for a land she had never seen. Scripture introduces her with a quiet weight of sorrow: Sarai was barren; she had no child. In a world and an age when a woman's worth was measured by her children, she carried that emptiness for decades even as her husband carried a promise of descendants as many as the stars.

Her faith was tested in frightening ways. Twice, when Abraham feared that foreign kings would kill him to take his beautiful wife, she was passed off as his sister and taken into a royal house, and each time God himself intervened to protect her and to guard the promise she bore. She was a woman who followed her husband and her God through danger and disappointment, holding on where the natural evidence of her own body gave her every reason to give up hope.

The long wait and the laughter of doubt

As the years passed and no child came, Sarai grew weary of waiting and tried to secure the promise by her own strength. She gave her Egyptian servant Hagar to Abram to bear a child on her behalf, and Ishmael was born, but the plan brought only rivalry, bitterness, and grief into the household. It is one of the Bible's honest pictures of what happens when we try to accomplish God's promises by our own devising rather than his timing.

When Sarai was ninety, God changed her name to Sarah, princess, and declared that she herself, and no substitute, would bear a son and become a mother of nations and of kings. Later, when three visitors came and one repeated the promise, Sarah overheard from the tent door and laughed within herself, thinking she was far too old for such pleasure. The LORD gently exposed her laughter and asked the question that stands at the heart of her whole story: Is any thing too hard for the LORD.

God had told Abraham that he would bless Sarah and give a son by her, and that she would become a mother of nations, and kings of peoples would come from her. The whole promise now rested on one impossible birth, and God tied it firmly to Sarah herself, that no one might imagine the covenant child had come by human strength. Her long barrenness only made it plainer that the son of promise was the gift of God alone.

The laughter of joy

The answer to that question was Isaac. In her old age, exactly at the time God had appointed, Sarah conceived and bore a son to Abraham, and they named him Isaac, which means laughter. The doubt that had made her laugh in unbelief was turned into overflowing joy, and she said, God hath made me to laugh, so that all that hear will laugh with me. The barren woman had become a mother, and the impossible promise had become a living child at her breast.

Sarah's later years were not without conflict, especially over the place of Hagar and Ishmael beside her own son, yet God confirmed that the covenant would run through Isaac. She died at a hundred and twenty-seven years old, the only woman in the Bible whose age at death is recorded, and Abraham mourned her and wept for her, and bought the cave of Machpelah to bury her, the first small piece of the promised land the family would ever own.

Hagar and Ishmael

The shadow over Sarah's story is her treatment of Hagar. Having given her servant to Abraham in her impatience, Sarah then grew jealous when Hagar conceived and despised her, and she dealt harshly with her, so that Hagar fled into the wilderness. There the angel of the LORD found her by a spring of water, comforted her, and sent her back with a promise for her son Ishmael, and Hagar called the LORD the God who sees, marveling that she had been seen by God in her distress.

Years later, after Isaac was born, the tension came to a head, and at Sarah's insistence Hagar and Ishmael were sent away into the desert. It is a hard and human story, and Scripture does not excuse the cruelty in it. Yet God did not abandon Hagar or her boy; he heard the voice of the child, opened her eyes to a well of water, and promised to make of Ishmael a great nation. Even in the failures of the covenant family, God showed his care for the outsider and the outcast, a mercy that would one day widen to embrace all the nations.

Her character and significance

Sarah is drawn as a real woman, capable of deep faith and of doubt, of loyalty and of impatience, of laughter both bitter and glad. The New Testament remembers her not for her failures but for her faith, saying that through faith Sarah herself received strength to conceive because she judged him faithful who had promised, and Peter holds her up as an example of a holy woman who trusted God and did not give way to fear.

She is the first of the matriarchs, the mother of the whole covenant line. God insisted that the promise would run through her son and no other, so that Isaac, and not Ishmael, would be the child of promise, and the entire nation of Israel would trace itself back to this one woman long past the age of bearing children. In her the Bible shows that God's purposes do not depend on human strength, youth, or timing.

Where Sarah points to Christ

Paul uses Sarah as a living picture of grace. Isaac, the child of promise born by the power of God to a barren woman, stands for all who are children of God not by natural descent or human effort but by God's promise, born, as it were, from above. The two sons, one of the slave woman and one of the free, become for Paul a portrait of two ways to relate to God, by law and bondage or by promise and freedom.

The impossible birth in Sarah's old age foreshadows a still greater impossibility, the birth of Jesus to a virgin, when again the answer to human helplessness was that nothing is too hard for the LORD. The God who opened a barren womb to begin the nation of promise would one day open a virgin's womb to bring the Savior of that nation and of the world, and Sarah's laughter of joy finds its final echo in the joy of every heart that receives the child she could never have imagined her line would bear.

A note on the sources: everything above is drawn from the biblical text itself. Where a detail comes from later tradition rather than Scripture, it is named as tradition. Dates for the earliest figures are traditional and approximate, and Scripture does not always give them. The aim is to tell each life honestly, and to let it do what the whole Bible does, point to Jesus Christ the Lord.

Related: Abraham · Isaac · All the people of the Bible