Abram to Abraham; Sarai to Sarah, Part Two

     The renaming of Abram and Sarai occurred during the time when God told Abram/Abraham that his beloved late life (very late life) son, Ishmael, the son of Sarai's Egyptian slave, Hagar (Genesis 16), would not be the promised heir.  The heir would be another, yet unborn, son with the infertile and aged Sarai as the mother.

     Light on the meaning of this may come post-biblical Jewish tradition.  In the midrash, Bereshit Rabbah (68, 11f), Rabbi Nehemiah said, "The Holy One, blessed be He, united His name with Abraham; with Isaac too he united His name."  

     One of the names of God is "Yahweh" (in biblical Hebrew this is represented as HWHY, read from right to left).  Remember that the ancients believed that names and even the letters of which the names were composed carried meaning and power.

     When God confirmed His covenant to Abram by declaring that Sarai's son would be the long-promised heir, He inserted himself (the "H") into their names, giving them new and suddenly different lives.

     Through their son, Isaac, Abraham and Sarah were made the ancestors of multitudes and the human ancestors of the Messiah, the Redeemer of the world.  God's name, inserted into their own, was the divine confirmation of this honor. 

Abram to Abraham; Sarai to Sarah, Part One

     (The next few posts will be about the names of Abraham, Isaac, and Sarah.)  

     The ancient Israelites (Abram's family and people were not yet Israelites but were their ancestors) believed that a name was not merely a designation of a person but that the name itself carried meaning, and in the case of God, extreme power.  That is why they never said God's name ("Yahweh," HWHY read right to left) out loud, instead referring to Him as "Adonai," "the Lord." (I'll explain in a later post how this led to the "modern" error of referring to God as "Jehovah.")

      The power and meaning of names was believed to extend down to the level of the individual letters.   The mystical Hebrew tradition said that God created the universe by manipulating the letters used to create the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, and that He dictated the Torah to Moses letter by letter.  (This is the basic underlying idea developed in the book, Cracking the Bible Code, which I will discuss in a later post.)

     The name "Abram" in Hebrew means "exalted father" and was changed by God to "Abraham," meaning "father of many."  The ending "-im" is a plural form.

"Neither shall thy name anymore be called Abram, but thy name sall be Abraham: for a father of many nations have I made thee." Genesis 17:5.

     The name of Abram's wife "Sarai" in Hebrew means "princess"and was changed by God to "Sarah," also meaning "princess," or perhaps "Princess." (There is no capitalization in Biblical Hebrew but my meaning will become clear in the second part of this article.)

"And God said unto Abraham, As for Sarai thy wife, thou shalt not call her name Sarai, but Sarah shall her name be." Genesis 17:15

     What could have been the reason for the name changes?  More tomorrow.