SARA (Heb. Šārah = Princess). - 1. Wife of Abraham; she was his sister on his father's side, but the daughter of another mother (Gen. 20:12): she is probably to be identified with Iescha (v.), daughter of Haran and sister of Lot (ibid. 11:27-31), as Flavius Josephus (Antiq. Iud., I, 6, 9) and St. Jerome (PL 22, 956) hold.
She followed Abraham (v.) from Ur of the Chaldees to the land of Canaan. Famine drove them to Egypt, where S. was abducted and brought to Pharaoh, to whom Abraham had presented her as his sister and not as his wife; but Pharaoh soon gave her back to Abraham, having been punished by God (Gen. 12). A similar episode occurs later in Abraham's encounter with Abimelech (v.), king of the Philistines (ibid. 20). Afflicted by long barrenness, and as the divine promises were slow to be fulfilled, S. gave her Egyptian servant Hagar to Abraham as a wife, by virtue of the right then in force, so that Hagar's son Ishmael (v.) would legally belong to him. But the Lord reconfirmed that from S. would be born the son who was heir of the promises (Gen. 17:15 ff.); and on that occasion he ordered Abraham to change his own name and that of his wife, who had previously been called Šāraj (probably an antiquated and less clear form of the name Šārah). The promise was not long in being fulfilled: S. gave birth to a son, Isaac (v.); she was then about 90 years old (Gen. 21:1-8). Later, because of jealous disagreements with Hagar, S. induced her husband to send away Ishmael and his mother (ibid. 21:9-21): St. Paul, referring to the episode, sees in the two mothers the two Testaments symbolized, the old in the slave Hagar and the new in S., the free woman who bears children in freedom (Gal. 4:22 ff.). She died in Hebron at the age of 127, and was buried in the cave of Machpelah (v.), which Abraham purchased on that occasion from the Hittites (Gen. 23).
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2. Among the other women of this name in the Old Testament, mention should be made of S., daughter of Raguel and wife of Tobias the younger (Tob. 6-11). At first tormented by the evil spirit Asmodeus (v.), who had killed her first seven husbands (ibid. 3:8), she was later freed from him through the intervention of the angel Raphael (v.), who arranged her marriage to her cousin Tobias, when he went to Ecbatana in Media (Vulg. Rages, today Hamadán in Iran) to collect the old debt. In the Mass for spouses the liturgy has adopted the beautiful formula of good wishes and blessing pronounced by Raguel at the marriage of his daughter S. to Tobias: "The God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob be with you, and may he join you together and fulfill his blessing in you" (Tob. 7:15). The wedding festivities celebrated at Ecbatana were then repeated at Nineveh in the house of Tobias's parents (ibid. 11:15 ff.). The two spouses spent their last years at Ecbatana in the house of Raguel (ibid. 14:21 ff.).