Sarah - wife of Abram (Abraham)

Sara, originally “Sarai”, meaning royal, was the half-sister of Abram.  She was also, nevertheless, his wife.  Along with their father Terah and her brother Lot she had emigrated from Ur in Chaldaea to Haran in Mesopotamia and later followed both to Canaan.
In its earliest accounts the Bible says of her that she remained childless.  She thus became a touchstone for her husband’s faith.  Twice Abram had in moments of faltering faith denied to heathen kings (Pharaoh in Egypt, King Abimelech of Gerara) that she was his wife, pointing out instead their brother-sister relationship, so as not to endanger his own life in the event that the ruling powers, as was customary at the time, would not kill him in order to gain his widow as a wife.   
However, God saved her both times from dishonour, because she was chosen to become the first matriarch of the people of Israel.  Her childlessness and being doomed to grow old without children was a serious test of Sarah’s faith.  Finally she ignored the divine promises to her husband of rich offspring and offered him instead her Egyptian maid Hagar to provide for him the offspring he yearned for.  This she did despite the fact that God had assured Abram that Sarah too would have a son and that he had already been given the name “Isaac”.   Sarah laughed in disbelief when she heard the most distinguished of the three strangers (angels = trinity) her husband was so hospitably entertaining at the entrance to their tent that within a year she would give birth to a son  She regarded this as impossible due to her advanced age of ninety.  However, she was to find out very soon that God makes all things possible!  Besides Abraham, Sarah represents the more human foundation of God’s salvation and it is precisely her human shortcomings, even disbelief, that God had chosen!  In Isaiah 51, 2, Sarah is given as a symbol for God's salvation, although humanly there does not seem to be a solution.  In the New Testament her obedience, she is assigned the qualities of belief and trust.  (Romans 9, 8f; Galatians 4, 22-26).
Sarah is first among the great wives of the Old Covenant.  She was a daughter of Eve with all her weakness.  She was to become the first matriarch of the redeemer through the wonder of divine mercy.   She died in Hebron at the age of 127 years.  Abraham held for her the lamentation of the dead and purchased a piece of land to ensure her a dignified resting place.  This was to be the first landed property acquired by the progenitor of the Israelite people in the Promised Land and Sarah, the first mother of the nation, was to be the first one to be buried there in that land.  Thus the dead were to be the first to own the Promised Land, until later it came to the possession of the living.