Sarai: the matriarch's name before God renamed her Sarah, an older form of a name meaning "princess"
The name belongs to one woman in the Bible and to no one else. It is the feminine form of the ordinary Hebrew word for a chief or an official (שַׂר), and that same feminine form serves elsewhere as a plain noun for a woman of rank (שָׂרָה), so the name simply says "princess" or "noblewoman." The Babylonian words for "king" and "queen" come from the same old stock of royal vocabulary, so a hint of rank sat in the name long before Genesis 17 promises that kings will come from her.
The puzzle is the ending. A Hebrew woman's name normally ends in the sound "ah," as Sarah does, while this form ends in "ai." An old tradition heard that ending as the word "my" and read the name as "my princess," but Hebrew does not build a possessive that way. Scholars now take the ending as a very old feminine ending instead, one that turns up on women's names in texts from Ugarit and among the Amorites and was later smoothed into the ordinary form. On that reading the two spellings are one name.
The way the Bible uses the two forms is strikingly tidy.
- Genesis uses this form for the living woman, from her introduction as Abram's wife through the move to Canaan, the journey into Egypt, and the conflict with Hagar.
- Genesis 17:15 speaks it once more, in the same sentence that takes it away.
- No other book of the Bible ever uses it, and from that verse on she is only Sarah (שָׂרָה).
What happens at Genesis 17:15 is therefore not a change of meaning. Both forms say the same thing, so what the renaming does is attach a new future to a woman who had been childless for decades: God blesses her twice over and promises that nations and kings will come from her. Her husband is renamed in the same scene, from Abram (אַבְרָם) to Abraham, and in both names the change hangs on a single letter that also belongs to God's own name, which readers have long taken as a sign that the covenant is now written into the two people who carry it.
Nuances
Whether the substitution of שָׂרָה for שָׂרַי in this verse carries any lexical content, or only theological and literary weight.
- majorityNone. Both forms are one name meaning princess, so the renaming is a Priestly covenant device parallel to Abram becoming Abraham: an etiological re-hearing of an existing name that inscribes national destiny (goyim, malke ammim, v. 16) into it, with no semantic upgrade.; C. Westermann, Genesis 12-36: A Continental Commentary, tr. J. J. Scullion (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1985), on Gen 17; G. J. Wenham, Genesis 16-50, WBC 2 (Dallas: Word, 1994), on Gen 17:15-16; N. M. Sarna, The JPS Torah Commentary: Genesis (Philadelphia: JPS, 1989), on Gen 17:15; V. P. Hamilton, The Book of Genesis: Chapters 1-17, NICOT (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990), on Gen 17:15-22; T. E. Fretheim, "Genesis," in The New Interpreter's Bible, vol. 1 (Nashville: Abingdon, 1994), on Gen 17:16
- minorityThe change does mark a widening of the title: Sarai was a princess for her own people only, while Sarah is princess for the whole world. Modern critical scholars treat this as the narrative point the Priestly writer aimed at rather than a philological account of the two forms.; b. Berakhot 13a; Bereshit Rabbah 47:1; Rashi on Genesis 17:15
Disputed
How to explain the anomalous ending of שָׂרַי, and therefore what the form is relative to שָׂרָה. That both forms belong to the root שׂרר and mean princess, feminine to שַׂר and cognate to Akkadian sarratu, is not contested; the morpheme is.
- majorityAn archaic or dialectal Northwest Semitic feminine ending, so שָׂרַי and שָׂרָה are one name in two forms, the ending later normalized to the ordinary feminine termination. Feminine personal names in -ay at Ugarit and in the Amorite onomasticon of Mari supply the parallels.; T. Noeldeke, ZDMG 40 (1886): 148ff.; 42 (1888): 484; GKC (Gesenius-Kautzsch-Cowley), Hebrew Grammar, section 80l; E. A. Speiser, Genesis, AB 1 (Garden City: Doubleday, 1964), 78, 124-128; N. M. Sarna, The JPS Torah Commentary: Genesis (Philadelphia: JPS, 1989), on Gen 11:29 and 17:15; S. D. Sperling, "Sarah," in Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2nd ed.; F. Groendahl, Die Personennamen der Texte aus Ugarit, Studia Pohl 1 (Rome: Pontifical Biblical Institute, 1967)
- minorityA first person possessive suffix, giving "my princess." Modern Hebraists reject this on morphological grounds: a first person singular suffix on a feminine noun in -ah yields sarati, as שָׂרָה itself does in Lamentations 1:1, while sar plus -ay would be masculine.; Jerome, Quaestiones Hebraicae in Genesin 3.323; Rashi on Genesis 17:15
- minorityNot a doublet of שָׂרָה at all but a formation from a different root. The Septuagint's differing renderings, Sara for Sarai against Sarra with doubled rho for Sarah, are taken to show that the translators heard two etymologically distinguishable forms.; P. de Lagarde, Uebersicht ueber die im Aramaeischen, Arabischen und Hebraeischen uebliche Bildung der Nomina (Goettingen, 1889), 92 n.; J. Skinner, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on Genesis, ICC (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1910), 237-239, 293-295
- minorityNot part of the Old Hebrew name stock actually in use, but an artificial or literary formation by the biblical author. Stamm answered this from Akkadian and Egyptian onomastic parallels, and most subsequent scholarship follows Stamm.; M. Noth, Die israelitischen Personennamen im Rahmen der gemeinsemitischen Namengebung, BWANT III/10 (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1928)