Sarai: Flawed Yet Faithful (Part One)

Bible Verses: Genesis 11:29-32, Genesis 12:5-13:1, Genesis 16:1-9, Genesis 17:15-21, Genesis 18:6-15, Genesis 20:1-21:12, Genesis 23:1-20, Genesis 24:36, Genesis 24:67, Genesis 25:10, Genesis 25:12, Genesis 49:29-32, Isaiah 51:1-2, Romans 4:18-20, Romans 9:8-9, Galatians 4:21-31, Hebrews 11:11-13, 1 Peter 3:1-6

Sarai is the woman mentioned the most number of times in the Bible. She was also the only woman to have her name changed by God, from Sarai to Sarah, which was an act with significant symbolism in the Bible. Sarai/Sarah was the first matriarch of the Jewish people, and the first woman in the ‘ancestral history’ of the Bible whom we know to have been a historical figure. Sarai lived around 2000 BC, during the middle of the Bronze Age in the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East. She was a very real women with her own faults and flaws, yet in spite of those is held up in the New Testament as an example of faith.

Sarai’s Genealogy

Sarai is first introduced as part of a genealogy that had descended from those who were at the tower of Babel. Genealogies and history were important in the Bible because they were a way to track the faithfulness of God and the fulfilment His promises over the long term. Sarai was the wife of Abram, as well as his half-sister (since that was considered acceptable at that point in history). A specific detail that is pointed out about her is that she was barren and had no children.

The Start of A Journey

Sarai initially lived in Ur of the Chaldees, a city in southern Mesopotamia that historians have associated with the worship of a moon god. She later travelled with her father Terah, her husband Abram, and her nephew Lot to Haran. The city of Haran is thought to be in the south of modern-day Turkey. Terah had originally intended to go to the land of Canaan and we don’t know why he stopped in Haran, but the family dwelt there for some time until Terah died and it was time to continue on their journey again.

After Terah had died, God called Sarai’s husband Abram. God told him to get out of that country for a land that God would show him later, promising to bless Abram and turn him into a great nation. So Sarai travelled on from Haran with her husband Abram, their nephew Lot, and all the servants they had gained. Sarai had no idea what she would face and must have been concerned about the promise that her husband would found a nation when she was unable to have children. God told them what they needed to know at that point, rather than all they wanted to know. Neither Sarai nor Abram could have understood God’s plans, but they decided to have faith and trust His promises. They travelled to the land of Canaan, which is around modern-day Israel, and then continued to journey south through Canaan. Their family had been chosen by God to bless all of humanity, for God saw potential they couldn’t even comprehend.

A Beautiful Woman

After some time there came a famine in the land of Canaan, so the family travelled further south into Egypt to avoid the famine. This perhaps also foreshadows later biblical events, such as when Joseph’s brothers travelled to Egypt during another famine. Sarai was incredibly beautiful, and because of this Abram afraid that the Egyptians would kill him in order to take her. To guard his own safety, Abram asked Sarai to say that she was his sister instead of his wife. Sarai clearly loved her husband Abram very much, because she agreed to his rather selfish plan.

When the Egyptians and their princes saw Sarai they told the Pharaoh of her beauty, and she was taken into the Pharaoh’s house. This was a dangerous situation for both Sarai and Abram, but especially so for Sarai. Not only was she a beautiful woman in a strange foreign land, but she was now held at the will of an extremely powerful man whose intentions we may guess, and her husband was too afraid of a threat on his own life to help her. If she pretended to be unmarried, the Pharaoh would take her regardless of her own wishes. If she admitted to being married, then her husband would most likely be killed and then the Pharaoh would take her anyway. All she could do was hope that God would somehow save her.

The Pharaoh thought that Abram was Sarai’s brother so, because of Sarai, treated Abram well and gave him many gifts. It was an outwardly prosperous yet secretly very tense situation. Luckily for them, God intervened. He had other plans for them. For Sarai’s sake, God sent plagues on Pharaoh and his house – which seems to foreshadow the plagues of Exodus. Discovering the truth through these plagues, Pharaoh called Abram to him. He asked why ever had Abram not told him that Sarai was his wife, and sent them both away out of Egypt with all of their belongings – including the possessions Abram had gained whilst there.

Challenging Times

Sarai travelled back into the south of Canaan with Abram, their nephew Lot, and their servants. Although her own situation seems to have been much more peaceful for some time afterwards, there were difficult situations with family that must have affected her on an emotional level at least. Her nephew Lot separated from the rest of the family, ended up living in the city of Sodom, was taken captive during a war that involved an attack on Sodom, and then her husband Abram went to war to free Lot. To top it all off, God reiterated His promise to Abram for a fourth time that Abram would have children and as many descendants as there are stars in the sky – even through Sarai was barren. While God’s promise was received as a blessing by Abram, it’s uncertain whether Sarai received it the same way. It must have been an enormous pressure to her. Perhaps she questioned whether she was just standing in Abram’s way, since it was clear she was unable to have children.

Capable of Cruelty

Sarai wasn’t a woman to just wait passively by. After ten years of having returned to Canaan from Egypt, she decided to take matters into her own hands. Sarai desperately longed for a child and God had promised her husband many descendants, but she recognised that God had stopped her from bearing children. She decided to turn to what was a common ‘solution’ in the surrounding cultures of that time and told Abram to sleep with her Egyptian handmaid Hagar. This is the first time we hear about Hagar, who was presumably gifted to her during her time in Egypt. The idea was that Hagar would bear a child on Sarai’s behalf so that Sarai could have a child through her. In the surrounding cultures of the time, a wife’s purpose was considered to be to provide heirs for her husband. If she was unable to, then it was considered her responsibility to find a second ‘wife’ for him. Sarai had clearly absorbed this expectation from those surrounding cultures and defined her worth by whether she was a mother or not.

Abram agreed to Sarai’s plan and Hagar became pregnant. On discovering this, Hagar began to feel superior about achieving what Sarai could not. She began to despise Sarai, her mistress, and no doubt Hagar rather rubbed this accomplishment in Sarai’s face, picking at Sarai’s most painful insecurities. Instead of finding joy in the child, which had been her plan after all, Sarai blamed Abram and told him that God would judge between them. Trying to stay out of it and avoid conflict, Abram told Sarai that Hagar was her servant so she could do as she liked. This led to Sarai harshly mistreating Hagar out of her jealousy, painful insecurities, anger at being looked down on, and desire to reestablish her status as Hagar’s mistress and Abram’s wife. For all her good qualities, Sarai had bad ones too. When angry and hurting she was capable of great cruelty, to the extent that Hagar ran away into the desert whilst still pregnant, although she later returned. This is the first example of woman against woman bullying in the Bible.

A Woman’s Worth

Sarai is presented to further extend the image from Eve of God’s intention for women. Eve was named the ‘mother of all the living’ before she had even had any children, and Sarai’s story further emphasises that children are not the root of women’s value or of a wife’s purpose. Because she had no child, Sarai thought she was nothing; whereas when Hagar had a child, Hagar thought she was everything. They both believed too much in what the world declared, and in seeking their worth through accomplishments found only misery. The fallen culture of our broken world tends to pit women against each other in competition, when they should instead be supporting and empowering each other.

Women may seek their value in motherhood like Sarai did, or nowadays they may seek it in a successful career, external appearance, a romantic relationship, superficial popularity, or even the mythical success of ‘having it all’. All of these are equally harmful. Although the accomplishments themselves may be good, they shouldn’t be the source of our identity. We don’t need to seek our worth through external validation, and if we do it will only leave us empty because the things of the world are all fleeting. As women, and as humans, we have intrinsic value because we are made in the image of God. We are unconditionally loved by God and have immense value in Him that is not dependent on whatever we might do or achieve.

A Renowned Princess

When Abram was 99-years-old and Sarai was 90-years-old, God made a covenant with Abram. God changed Abram’s name (meaning ‘exalted father’ in Hebrew) to Abraham (which meant ‘father of many’ in Hebrew), and He also changed Sarai’s name to Sarah. Names are significant in the Bible and changing their names indicates the new role that God had for them, symbolically establishing their new identities. Sarai meant ‘my princess’, showing that she was beloved and honoured by her family who had named her, as well as by God. Sarah, by comparison, means ‘princess’. This was an expansion of her identity to a wider recognition and historical importance. Sarah (as Sarai was now called) would be a princess not just to her own family who knew her, but to all people. She would be acknowledged and honoured as important in God’s human story – and as we’re still talking about her around 4,000 years later, we can see that God kept His promises!

As well as changing Sarai/Sarah’s name, God told Abram/Abraham that He would bless her and give them a son together. God would make Sarah ‘a mother of nations’ and declared that kings would be descended from her. On hearing this Abraham laughed because they were both old and long past childbearing years. God (who seems to have a sense of humour) confirmed that Sarah would have a son that time the next year and told Abraham to call their son ‘Isaac’, meaning ‘laughter’. God promised that He would make a covenant with Isaac and with his descendants after him for time everlasting – among whom we are counted if we believe. God named Sarah ‘princess’ and we are all daughters of the king if only we accept God as our king.

Sarai’s story will be continued in a second blog post, telling part two of her life under her new name of Sarah.