The Troublesome Lives of a Mother
At first glance, the story of the life of Sarah looks like nothing extraordinary, but a closer examination shows that much of it is lost in the story of the troublesome life of Avraham. Sarah is the only woman whose age is recorded in the Scriptures. Of all the women, only for Sarah are the number of her years as well as the place in which she was buried mentioned. This peculiarity comes to show how important her life was in the eyes of the narrator of Genesis. But all troubles for the matriarch began and ended with the grave mistake Avraham made when he misunderstood the words of the Omniscient One to bring his son up on the mountain.
“He who wrestles with nothing knows nothing and doubts nothing. One must constantly be asking, “Why?” about everything in life.” Navah
The Supernal One promised Avraham that he would have a son, only one son, through his wife Sarah, and a year later the promised son was born: promise given, promise kept. At the age of thirty-seven, this son was still childless, not even married, when He told Avraham to bring Yitschak up on the mountain. In his loyalty to the Lord, he brought him up on the mountain, but he went beyond what he was told to do; Avraham bound his son Yitschak, his only son, on the altar to slaughter him as a sacrifice to the One who had promised him that through this very son he would become a father of many nations. What really occurred on the mountain and most importantly why it occurred, we explained in separate works in the series “Patriarchs’ Saga”. But here it suffices to say that in the issue of the binding of Yitschak on the altar, there is a common mistake made by the traditional commentators when it is asserted that the Merciful YHVH had ordered Avraham to sacrifice his only son on the altar in order to test his faith. How grievously has this story been misunderstood! Avraham put himself into a situation from which extrication was most difficult. And those apologists who hold this view put themselves into the same situation from which extrication is most difficult, namely, how to defend the notion of human sacrifice, which is in a total contradiction to the Torah and Prophets. All of this places the mindful thinker in perplexity and demands explanation.
Somehow word reached Sarah that her husband had taken Yitschak to the mountain. And when Sarah heard that her only child had almost died by the hand his own father, the shock of Avraham’s attempted sacrifice of her son was too much for her heart to bear, and she died untimely at the age of 127. And this is how our Torah portion “The life of Sarah” begins: with her end.
We read the literal translation of the heading of the Torah portion dedicated to her: Chayei Sarah, The life of Sarah,
And the lives of Sarah were one hundred year and twenty year and seven years; the years of lives of Sarah. (Gen. 23:1)
The syntax of the statement is quite strange. Some details of the language employed here suggest that this literal translation of the verse carries an enigmatic meaning, which requires explanation, for the Torah tries to tell us something beyond what is immediately obvious, namely, the death of the matriarch. Sarah is the only woman whose age is mentioned in the Scriptures, perhaps because she was the mother of the promised seed.
Before Sarah’s life ended, another life had to begin, that of Rivkah, in order that she had to become the second matriarch of the people of Israel. First it was said in Genesis 22:20, “behold, Milkah, she too has borne children”, and one of her children was Rivkah. And only then it is said in our verse, “Sarah’s life was one hundred and …” Literally the verse reads: “The lives of Sarah were”, or figuratively: “the lifetime of Sarah was”. The word חַיִּים chayyim, “life”, always appears in the plural, “lives”, never in the singular, as in “the years of the lives (plural) of Sarah”. Why is this strange way to describe the life of the matriarch? Why the plural form “lives”, if not to allude to different periods of her life? Each of these periods the text alludes to was marked by its own peculiarity. And why the apparent redundancy of “the lives of Sarah were…” and “the years of lives of Sarah”?
Then the text goes on to reveal another peculiarity. There is a significance in the choice of words in the numbers of years of Sarah’s life: the word for “year” (shanah) is in the singular in the phrase “a hundred year and twenty year”, while with the number seven it is in the plural (shanim): “seven years”. “The lives of Sarah were” means that all these years represent her lifetime.
Insight: For the peculiar wording of this verse, we will resort to the comment of Ibn Ezra, a grammarian himself, who explains: “Hebrew usually first lists the larger numbers and then the smaller ones. But we also find the opposite, an example being Scripture’s enumeration of Jacob’s years”. Gen 47:28 thus literally reads, “So the days of Ya’akov, the years of his life were seven years and forty and a hundred year”, listing the smaller numbers first and then the larger numbers. The reckoning of the lives of Sarah and Ya’akov are in contrast with how Avraham’s years are reckoned—”And these are the days of years of life of Avraham, which he lived: a hundred year, and seventy year, and five years“—wherein the years are counted from the larger numbers to the smaller ones. In an identical manner to his father, the years of Ishmael are reckoned: “And these are the years of the life of Ishmael, a hundred and thirty and seven year” (Gen 25:17). We now return to the text.
And indeed, her 127 years of lifetime, from the time Yitschak was born until her passing at 127, can be broken down to 90 + 37 years; before Yitschak was born she lived all of her 90 years childless (Gen 17:17), and then she lived another life, her real life of 37 years, the life of her son; these were two different lives of her lifetime. When Yitschak was bound on the altar by his father, he was thirty-seven years old, and immediately after that the Torah saw fit to inform us that Sarah died, and Avraham came to mourn and weep for her. These thirty-seven years of Yitschak’s birth were thus the real life of Sarah. The Zohar sheds light on this peculiarly giving us the hint the Hebrew word וַיִּהְיוּ va’yihyu, with which the Torah portion begins has the numerical value of thirty-seven in Gematria. Gematria thus assigning a numerical value to this word, indicates that it bears some relation to the last 37 years of Sarah’s life.
Alternatively, the traditional commentators explain that at the age of one hundred years, Sarah’s beauty was like of a twenty-year old woman, and at the age of twenty, she was righteous as a seven-year-old girl.
The literal translation of the verse 1 requires explanation. As we noted above, the word “life” (chayyim) is always encountered in the plural; in a possessive form, it becomes chayei. Rav Mordechai Rubenstein explains that the Hebrew word shanim, “years”, can mean two things: “the years of”, for it is in a constructive (possessive) form shenei, but it can also mean “two”. Therefore, the phrase shenei chayei Sarah does not only mean, “the years of life of Sarah”, but it could also mean, “two lives of Sarah”. Thus, each life of Sarah is to be distinguished and looked at as a separate term and interpreted by itself.
Sarah gave birth to Yitschak when she was 90 and died when she was 127, thus she lived for 37 years after Yitschak was born. Therefore, if we accept the interpretation that Sarah had two lives, which appears to us to be an alternative translation, the life of Sarah can be broken down into two periods: before and after the birth of her son, and verse 1 can take another rendering,
And the lives of Sarah were one hundred year and twenty year and seven years; the two lives of Sarah. (Gen. 23:1)
Towards the end of the Torah portion Chayei Sarah, the Torah states that after Avraham died, “Elohim blessed Yitschak his son”.
… there was Avraham buried, and Sarah his wife. And it came to be, after the death of Avraham, that Elohim blessed his son Yitschak. And Yitschak dwelt at Be’er Lachai Ro’i. (Gen 25:10-11)
Why was it that the Supernal, and not Avraham, blessed Yitschak? Yitschak blessed his sons, Ya’akov blessed his sons, and even Mosheh blessed the children of Israel, but Avraham did not bless his only son. Perhaps, there already was a division between father and son, which division we addressed elsewhere.
And immediately after the Torah stated that Avraham was buried in the same burial place where he buried her, and that it was not Avraham who blessed Yitschak, it saw fit to list the generations of Ishmael, the son of Hagar, her handmaid, whom Sarah expelled from Yitschak. We read,
Now these are the generations of Ishmael, Avraham’s son, whom Hagar the Egyptian, Sarah’s handmaid, bore to Avraham. (Gen 25:12)
“These are the generations of Ishmael son of Avraham”, why does this verse describing the lineage of Ishmael, in the Torah portion titled, “The life of Sarah”, here follows the verses of the burial of Avraham and Sarah, and how does it relate to Sarah?
Insight: Because Sarah gave birth to Yitschak, when she was 90 and died when she was 127, she lived for 37 years with her long-awaited son Yitschak. Hence, we know that when Sarah died, Ishmael was 51 years of age and Yitschak was 37. Yitschak was the most long-lived of the three Patriarchs (compare Avraham lived 175 years, Yitschak 180 years, and Ya’akov 147 years). We now return to the text to explain.
If we reflect, having recorded Avraham’s death and his burial, the Torah now describes how the Eternal Elohim fulfilled His promise of making Avraham’s two sons into great nations: verses 12 through 18 for Ishmael, and verses 19 through the following Torah portion Toldot, the Generations (of Yitschak) for Avraham’s principal son. The genealogy of Ya’akov through his father Yitschak would follow later at the end of the first book of the Torah.
Having now completed our exposition, we will address the question we asked: Why does the genealogy of Ishmael appear in Sarah’s Torah portion followed by the genealogy of Yitschak? It is listed here in order to show that even though Ishmael was the firstborn son of Avraham by the flesh of a handmaid, it was Sarah, Avraham’s true wife, through whom the promised seed was called (Gen 21:12) and that Avraham’s descendants would always be known through his son Yitschak and his descendants. That must have been the reason for the appearance of Yitschak’s descendants after Ishmael’s. It was necessary for the narrator to do this in order to prevent the wrong impression that might be created in the mind of the reader that Ishmael being described first was the principal heir. But the genealogy of the promised son, Yitschak, comes next to make it clear through whom the lineage would continue. Ishmael has never been mentioned in the Torah again.
These were the troublesome lives of Sarah: before and after the birth her only child Yitschak. The life of the first matriarch ended untimely so that Rivkah became the new female head of the family through whom a new nation was born. As the next Torah portion Toldot will begin, the new matriarch would have her own troubles when two nations began to struggle in her womb.
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