Sarah (originally Sarai) is a biblical matriarch, prophet, and major figure in Abrahamic religions. While different Abrahamic faiths portray her differently, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all depict her character similarly, as that of a pious woman, renowned for her hospitality and beauty, the wife of Abraham, and the mother of Isaac. Sarah has her feast day on 1 September in the Catholic Church, 19 August in the Coptic Orthodox Church, 20 January in the LCMS, and 12 and 20 December in the Eastern Orthodox Church.
In the Hebrew Bible
Narrative In the biblical narrative, Sarah is the wife of Abraham. She was originally called Sarai. During the narrative of the covenant of circumcision in Genesis 17, God renames Abram and Sarai as Abraham and Sarah, then promises them that they will have a son. According to most modern scholars, both Sarah and Sarai come from the same root SRR, with both meaning "important woman". A minority of scholars derive Sarai from the root SRY, meaning "contend with" or "withstand", similar to the name Israel.
Departure from Ur Terah, with Abram (as he was then called), Sarai and Lot, departed for Canaan, but stopped in a place named Harran, where Terah remained until he died at the age of 205. God told Abram to leave his country and his father's house for a land that he would show him, promising to make of him a great nation, bless him, make his name great, bless those who blessed him, and curse "him" that curses him. Following God's command, Abram took his wife Sarai, his nephew Lot, and the wealth and slaves that they had acquired, and traveled to Shechem in Canaan. Abram was 75 at this time.
Pharaoh
There was a severe famine in the land of Canaan, so Abram and Lot and their households travelled south to Egypt. On the journey to Egypt, Abram instructed Sarai to identify herself only as his sister, fearing that the Egyptians would kill him in order to take his wife, saying, When brought before Pharaoh, Sarai said that Abram was her brother, and the king thereupon took her into his palace and bestowed upon Abram many presents and marks of distinction. However, God afflicted Pharaoh's household with great plagues. Pharaoh then realized that Sarai was Abram's wife and demanded that they leave Egypt immediately.
Genesis 16:1 records that Sarai had "an Egyptian servant", Hagar,: NET Bible whom Sarai may have brought with her from this time.Ryle, H. E. (1921), Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges on Genesis 16, accessed on 16 April 2026
Hagar and Ishmael
After having lived in Canaan for ten years and still childless, Sarai suggested that Abram have a child with her Egyptian handmaiden, Hagar, to which he agreed. Hagar's pregnancy resulted in tension between Sarai and Hagar, and Sarai complained to her husband that the handmaid no longer respected her. At one point, Hagar fled from her mistress but returned after angels consoled her. She gave birth to Abram's son Ishmael when Abram was eighty-six years old.
Isaac In , when Abram was ninety-nine years old, God declared his new name: "Abraham" – "a father of many nations", and made the covenant of circumcision with him. God gave Sarai the new name "Sarah", and blessed her. Then God told Abraham that Sarah would have a son and Abraham responded by laughing at the idea of a pregnancy at their advanced age. Not long afterwards, Abraham and Sarah were visited by three men. One of the visitors told Abraham that upon his return next year, Sarah would have a son. While at the tent entrance, Sarah overheard what was said, and she laughed to herself about the prospect of having a child at their ages. The visitor inquired of Abraham why Sarah laughed at the idea of bearing a child, for her age was as nothing to God. Sarah denied laughing, because she was afraid.
Sarah soon became pregnant and bore a son to Abraham, at the very time which had been spoken. The patriarch, then a hundred years old, named the child "Isaac" (Hebrew yitschaq, "laughter") and circumcised him when he was eight days old. For Sarah, the thought of giving birth and nursing a child, at such an old age, also brought her much laughter, as she declared, "God had made me to laugh, [so that] all that hear will laugh with me." Abraham held a great feast on the day when Isaac was weaned. It was during this banquet that Sarah happened upon the then teenaged Ishmael mocking Isaac, and she was so disturbed that she requested that both he and Hagar be banished. Abraham was initially distressed by this, but he relented when told by God to do as his wife had asked.
Abimelech
After being visited by the three men, Abraham and Sarah settled between Kadesh and Shur in the land of the Philistines. While he was living in Gerar, Abraham again claimed that Sarah was his sister. King Abimelech subsequently had her brought to him. Later, God came to Abimelech in a dream and declared that taking her would result in death because she was a married woman. Abimelech, who had not laid hands on her, inquired if he would also slay a righteous nation, especially since Abraham had claimed that he and Sarah were siblings. In response, God told Abimelech that he did indeed have a blameless heart and that was why he continued to exist. However, if he did not return Sarah to Abraham, God would surely destroy Abimelech and his entire household. Abimelech was informed that Abraham was a prophet who would pray for him.
Early the next morning, Abimelech informed his servants of his dream and approached Abraham inquiring as to why he had brought such great guilt upon his kingdom. Abraham replied that he thought there was no fear of God in that place, and that they might kill him for his wife. Then Abraham defended what he had said as not being a lie at all: "And yet indeed she is my sister; she is the daughter of my father, but not the daughter of my mother; and she became my wife." Abimelech returned Sarah to Abraham, and gave him gifts of sheep, oxen, and servants; and invited him to settle wherever he pleased in Abimelech's lands. Further, Abimelech gave Abraham a thousand pieces of silver to serve as Sarah's vindication before all. Abraham then prayed for Abimelech and his household, since God had stricken the women with infertility because of the taking of Sarah.
Death Sarah died at the age of 127. Abraham mourned after her death, and bought a piece of land with a cave near Hebron from Ephron the Hittite in which to bury her. This was the first land owned by the Israelites in Canaan, according to the biblical narrative. The place became known as the Cave of the Patriarchs.
After her death, Abraham married Keturah, whose identity midrashic writers and biblical scholars have debated (that is, whether or not she was actually Hagar),See Keturah#Relationship with Abraham and together they had at least six more children.
Isaac found comfort after the death of his mother in his marriage to Rebekah.
Later Hebrew Bible references Sarah is mentioned alongside Abraham in Isaiah 51:2: Look to Abraham your father, and to Sarah who bore you.
New Testament references The First Epistle of Peter praises Sarah for obeying her husband., cited in She is praised for her faith in the Hebrews "hall of faith" passage alongside a number of other Old Testament figures. Other New Testament references to Sarah are in Romans, cited in and Galatians. In Galatians 4, she and Hagar are used as an allegory of the old and new covenants:
"For it is written that Abraham had two sons, one by the slave woman and the other by the free woman. His son by the slave woman was born in the ordinary way; but his son by the free woman was born as the result of a promise. These things may be taken figuratively, for the women represent two covenants. One covenant is from Mount Sinai and bears children who are to be slaves: This is Hagar. Now Hagar stands for Mount Sinai and corresponds to the present city of Jerusalem, because she is in slavery with her children. But the Jerusalem that is above is free, and she is our mother...Now you, brothers, like Isaac, are children of promise...Therefore, brothers, we are not children of the slave woman, but of the free woman."
Historicity In the early and middle 20th century, leading archaeologists such as William Foxwell Albright and biblical scholars such as Albrecht Alt believed that the patriarchs and matriarchs were either real individuals or believable composites of people who lived in the "patriarchal age", the 2nd millennium BCE. But in the 1970s, new arguments concerning Israel's past and the biblical texts challenged these views; these arguments can be found in Thomas L. Thompson's The Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives (1974), and John Van Seters' Abraham in History and Tradition (1975). Thompson, a literary scholar, based his argument on archaeology and ancient texts. His thesis centered on the lack of compelling evidence that the patriarchs lived in the 2nd millennium BCE, and noted how certain biblical texts reflected first-millennium conditions and concerns. Van Seters examined the patriarchal stories and argued that their names, social milieu, and messages strongly suggested that they were Iron Age creations. By the beginning of the 21st century, archaeologists had given up hope of recovering any context that would make the patriarchs and matriarchs credible historical figures.
Religious views
In Judaism Sarah first appears in the Book of Genesis, while the Midrash and Aggadah provide some additional commentary on her life and role within Judaism and its ancestral form, Yahwism. She is born Sarai (Hebrew: שָׂרַי) in Ur Kaśdim, or Ur of the Chaldees, believed to have been in present-day Iraq, 1,958 Anno Mundi, according to the Hebrew calendar. She was the daughter of Haran and the granddaughter of Terah, an idolater who worshiped the Moon god Nanna and high-ranking servant of Nimrod, the king of Shinar, or Mesopotamia, but not of his wife, Amathlai. Her name is a feminine form of sar (), meaning "chieftain" or "prince". Through Terah, she would have been a 10th-generation descendant of Noah, still alive, living in the Mountains of Ararat, and over nine centuries old at the time of her birth. No details are given as to her life or her religious beliefs before Abraham's return to Ur Kaśdim to thwart Nimrod's efforts to proclaim himself a god. It is known she wed Abraham, then called Abram, sometime between the ages of forty and five and following her husband's public humiliation of Nimrod, she, along with her father Terah, her orphaned nephew Lot, her manservant Eliezer, and some three hundred others left Ur Kaśdim for Canaan, the present-day Levant, to save Abraham from a plot by Nimrod to destroy him, commanded to do so by God.