Sarah שרה אמנו

Sarah was born in 1958, ten years after Avraham. First called Sarai, she is renamed Sarah at the covenant of circumcision—"princess" not of one household but of all. She leaves Ur Kasdim and Charan with her husband and is twice taken into a foreign king's palace, in Egypt and by Avimelech, and twice delivered.

For decades she is childless. It is Sarah who gives Hagar to Avraham, and Sarah who later demands that Yishmael be sent away—and God tells Avraham, "whatever Sarah says to you, listen to her voice", from which the sages conclude that she surpassed him in prophecy.

At eighty-nine she is promised a son and laughs inwardly. A year later, at ninety, she bears Yitzchak—"he will laugh". She dies at 127 in the year 2085, just after the Akedah, and Avraham buys the cave of Machpelah in Chevron for her burial: the first piece of land owned by a Jewish family in Canaan.