Righteous Sarah

Sarah, originally called Sarai, is the wife of the patriarch Abraham and the mother of Isaac. She is one of the great matriarchs of the Old Testament and is honored in the Orthodox Church among the Holy Forefathers, the ancestors of Christ according to the flesh. By tradition she came from Mesopotamia, born in Ur of the Chaldees, and was Abraham's half-sister, sharing the same father, Terah. With Abraham, her father, and Abraham's nephew Lot, she left Ur and, after a stay in Harran, journeyed to the land of Canaan when Abraham was seventy-five years old.

The defining feature of Sarah's life in the scriptural account is her long barrenness and the promise of a son granted to her in extreme old age. After she had remained childless for many years in Canaan, she gave her Egyptian servant Hagar to Abraham, and Hagar bore Ishmael. When Abraham was ninety-nine, God renewed the promise that Sarah herself would bear a son. Sarah laughed at the prospect of childbearing in her old age, yet she conceived and bore Isaac, whose name is associated with that laughter. The Synaxarion and the New Testament alike hold her up as a model of faith and trust in God against all natural expectation.

Sarah died at the age of one hundred and twenty-seven, and Abraham purchased a cave near Hebron in which to bury her, the place later known as the Cave of Machpelah, or the Cave of the Patriarchs, where Abraham himself was afterward laid to rest. In the Orthodox calendar she is commemorated among the Forefathers in the weeks before the Nativity of Christ, when the Church remembers the righteous ancestors who awaited and prefigured the Messiah.