Thread:FrenchTouch/@comment-1777104-20160628182638

Hi, again. Here is a sketch of the life of Sarah. I would encourage you to read about her in the book of Genesis (chapters 16--23). I hope this sketch helps you to understand Sarah (and perhaps the God of Abraham) a bit better.

Sarah was the daughter of Terah and half-sister of Abraham. Having grown to adulthood in the family of Terah, she most likely believed in the gods of the Chaldeans among whom she lived. However, her older brother, who had been born of her father's first wife, had listened to another God, the God of Shem and Noah, the founders of civilization as Sarah knew it.

For whatever reasons, Terah seemed to not trust the people of Ur. This may have had something to do with death of his son Haran in Ur. Haran's daughter Milcah became Nahor's wife and Sarai (Heb: Sari = Princess) married Abram, assuring a tight-nit family for maximum security. Haran's son Lot, and apparently his wife, came along as well.

For many years, Sarai lived in hopelessness, unable to have any children. Even after leaving the homestead in Haran with Abraham and her nephew/cousin Lot, she seems to have been bewildered by the promise that the God of her husband had made. Her faith was more in Abram than it was in his God, or in the gods of her father. She trusted his judgment, twice, when he told a half-truth to conceal their marriage from foreign kings. Both times, the God of Shem, her ancestor, intervened through dreams and disease to prevent her from being violated.

After acquiring a young slave girl named Hagar in Egypt (probably part of the payment to get her and her husband to leave!), Sarai saw an opportunity to "help" God fulfill the promise of a child for Abram. She insisted that the younger woman carry a child for her husband. As one might expect, this did not work out the way she wanted it to. Even before the child was born, Sarai rejected him, sending Hagar into the wilderness to fend for herself. When God, through an angel, sent Hagar back to Abram, she raised the child as her own. Sarai was "out of the loop."

Over a decade passed, Lot and his family went to live in the city and some messengers came from God to tell Abraham that the city where Sarah's cousins were living was to be destroyed. At the same time, though, they promised that Sarah would indeed have a baby, even at the advanced age of 90! This was nonsense to her, for she knew this was way past that. Though she dared not talk back to the spokesman for the Almighty God, she laughed to herself at their proposal. They heard her anyway! All she could do was have faith that God was indeed able to open her womb even as he had closed those of the Philistines earlier that year (because of the threat to her well-being).

About the time her neices were having Lot's sons, Sarah gave birth to her only son, named "Isaac" which means "laugher." This time it was not in doubt, but in praise to a God so powerful--and understanding of her weakness--that he would allow her the pleasure of being a mother. However, her jealousy of Hagar's son moved her to once again banish Hagar and her son from the household. She would never see either of them again.

For the final 37 years of her life, Sarah would raise Isaac to adulthood. At her advanced age it is not clear as to whether she "looked forward" to seeing her grandchild. At any rate, she died before a wife was found for Isaac. It is perhaps because of her concerns that no woman from among their neighbors were deemed suitable. Soon after her death, Abraham would send a servant back to the family homestead where Nahor and his extended family still lived, to find a wife of the house of Terah for the son of Sarah's old age. 