sarah

BDB (s.v. שָׂרָה) and HALOT (s.v. שׂרר) derive שָׂרָה, like שָׂרַי, from the root שׂרר, to rule, making the name feminine to the very common שַׂר and semantically transparent as princess or noblewoman; the same form serves as a plain common noun for a woman of rank in Judges 5:29, 1 Kings 11:3, Isaiah 49:23, Lamentations 1:1, and Esther 1:18. The philological debate concerns not this form but the earlier שָׂרַי, whose unusual ־ַי ending Noeldeke (ZDMG 40 [1886]: 148ff.; 42 [1888]: 484), GKC section 80l, and Koenig treat as an archaic Northwest Semitic feminine morpheme identical in meaning to the ordinary ending on שָׂרָה, a reading strengthened by Ugaritic feminine personal names in -ay (Groendahl, Die Personennamen der Texte aus Ugarit) and worked out for Genesis specifically by Speiser (AB Genesis, 78, 124-128) and Sarna (JPS Genesis). On this consensus view, the renaming of Genesis 17:15 substitutes no new sense; it substitutes the archaic ending for the ordinary one within a single name.

On the renaming scene itself, Westermann assigns Genesis 17 to the Priestly source and reads the double renaming, Abram to Abraham alongside Sarai to Sarah, as a covenant device reworking earlier tradition around covenant identity rather than a change of meaning. Wenham notes the chapter's three-part structure, each part opening with a divine speech (verses 3, 9, 15) that turns in sequence on Abraham, his household, and Sarah, making her a covenant member in her own right rather than an appendage to her husband. Fretheim reads the doubled blessing of verse 16, in which God says both that he will bless her and that he will give Abraham a son by her, as making Sarah a recipient of blessing rather than merely its vehicle, and Frymer-Kensky (ABD 5:981-82; "Sarah 1/Sarai," in Women in Scripture, 150-51) stresses that this is one of the very few divine renamings of a woman in the Hebrew Bible. Sarna situates the change against the ancient Near Eastern pattern of accession names marking a new destiny under a new authority (Joseph to Zaphenath-Paneah, Hoshea to Joshua, Eliakim to Jehoiakim), and reads Sarai to Sarah as strictly parallel to Abram to Abraham.

The distribution of the two forms is itself part of the argument: שָׂרַי occurs seventeen times, ending at Genesis 17:15, while שָׂרָה occurs thirty-eight times after that verse, all but one of them in Genesis, with the sole exception at Isaiah 51:2, where the prophet names Abraham and Sarah together as the couple from whom a whole people is descended. Commentators on Isaiah 40-66 read that verse, which opens by calling Abraham the rock and Sarah the quarry a nation was hewn from, as an encouragement to a discouraged remnant in exile: the couple God multiplied from childlessness into a nation can be trusted to do so again.