According to Genesis 11:27 ff, "Terach (תֶּרַח) begat Av-Ram (אַבְרָם), Nachor (נָחוֹר), and Haran (הָרָן); and Haran begat Lot (לוֹט). And Haran died in the presence of his father Terach in the land of his nativity, in Ur Kasdim. And Av-Ram and Nachor took wives: the name of Av-Ram's wife was Sarai (שָׂרָי); and the name of Nachor's wife was Milkah (מִלְכָּה), the daughter of Haran, the father of Milkah, and the father of Yiskah (יִסְכָּה)."
Which leaves out the most important piece of information - who was Sarai's father? This will matter later, because Av-Ram will claim that she is his sister.
According to the Book of Jubilees (11:13), " Terah took to himself a wife, and her name was 'Edna, the daughter of 'Abram, the daughter of his father's sister. And in the seventh year of this week [1876 A.M.] she bare him a son, and he called his name Abram, by the name of the father of his mother";
The name is pronounced Sarai, as though it were written phonetically as Sar-eye - but this may not be correct; without the Nekudot it could just as likely be pronounced Sar'i; and with the qamats in the Masoretic pointing Sara'i. Sarah = "princess" or "noblewoman" (cf Judges 5:29; Esther 1:18; Isaiah 49:23; 1 Kings 11:3 and many others). Sara'i would simply be the possessive form = "my princess", as Sar'i would be "my prince" in the masculine. Presumably it was not originally a name, but a title or a pet-name.
As Sarai she was the wife of Av-Ram and also, at least according to what he tells Pharaoh and Avi-Melech (see below), his half-sister; as Sarah the wife of Av-Raham, and again his half-sister. Probably two versions of the same legend, the name variations being regional, dialectic.
The incest implied (cf Leviticus 20:17) would have given the Redactor a problem. If Sarai was indeed Av-Ram's half-sister by a different mother, their marriage would have been taboo. Therefore the texts make her Av-Ram's brother's daughter, whereby the marriage would not have been incestuous, until the time of King David, who outlawed it as incestuous. In Mitsrayim (Egypt), with whom both Sarai and Av-Ram are linked, such marriages were commonplace. Nevertheless it makes for interesting comment in the light of the twin-story of Avi-Melech of Gerar (Genesis 20) and the Egyptian Pharaoh (Genesis 12:11 ff). See the commentaries for a fuller explanation.
What though of the possibility that Sarah (שרה) is a deliberate and convenient misreading of Asherah (אשרה): it requires the removal of the prefictual Aleph (א) - but that happens constantly in the switch between Chaldean/Aramaic and Yehudit, and a reading of Seen (ש) as Sheen (ש), which given there was no "pointing" until the middle ages is perfectly feasible. It is a difficult case to make on purely etymological terms; mythologically, however, it is remarkably obvious, and it also helps us with the apparent incest, because in the divine trinities of all Middle Eastern cultures, the father god and mother goddess, who are also the sun and moon, the day and night, and who share the ruling of the cosmos on those terms, are always both spouses and siblings. I am deliberately not drawing any conclusion in this matter, but readers will see, as they peruse the texts, that TheBibleNet finds very strong evidence that the family of Terach was originally the Emorite pantheon, later reduced to mere human form by the Ezra'ic Redactor.
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