Meet the People of the Bible: Sarah's Story
		Hello!  My name is Sarah and I am Abraham’s wife.  Abraham and I lived about 3800 years ago.  It was around then that Abraham heard God’s call when we were dwelling in the land of Ur. Most of the stories in the Bible take place in a part of Asia Minor and the Middle East called the Fertile Crescent—this area was the land that gave birth to the very first human civilizations.  The principles of agriculture were discovered here.  The first wild animals were domesticated here and the earliest cities were built here.  It is also where humans developed the first organized religions.
			When Abraham and I lived in Ur and Haran and later when we migrated to the land Canaan we lived in cultures that worshipped many pagan gods.  Here is a picture of the ancient ziggurat at Ur.  This ziggurat was built to worship the moon goddess, Nanna.  There were gods of the harvest, gods of war, gods of fertility, gods of revenge, gods of the son and moon, gods of particular clans and tribes and cities, gods of the seasons, and many more.  We didn’t think that this was unusual at all. Even though we were surrounded by hundreds of pagan gods, Abraham and I were the first persons in history to hear the call of the Lord, our God, who is the one, true God.  God called us to migrate north from Ur in the south of modern-day Iraq to Haran in the south of modern-day Turkey.  From there he called Abraham to leave his father in Haran and migrate south to the land of Canaan which is now modern day Israel.  So we packed up our tents, all of our possessions and our livestock and moved to the land of Canaan.
				God promised Abraham that he would give to our descendants the whole land of Canaan and that he would make our descendants a great nation.  God promised that we would always be his people and our promise to God was that the Lord would always be our God.  This promise is remembered by all of God’s people as God’s Covenant with Abraham.  This is a promise made by God and he would always be our God and we would always be his people, and God has never been unfaithful to his promise even though God’s people have many times forgotten about God and followed false idols, personalities, power and money.  The story of the Bible to a great extent is the story of the Covenant—the enduring relationship—between God and his people.  Whenever the people drift away, God is always there to call them home and renew his covenant with them. Anyway, when The Lord made his promise I thought that this was kind of funny at the time because I was very old—past my time to bear children--and did not have any children of my own.  But The Lord gave me a son and we named him Isaac.  God works wondrous miracles, and the birth of my son Isaac was the greatest miracle of God that I witnessed.   From Isaac came Jacob and from Jacob came twelve sons whose descendants would become the 12 Tribes of Israel.