In Judaism Sarah is the founding mother of the people, the first of the matriarchs (with Rebekah, Rachel and Leah) invoked in prayer and remembered for her hospitality and her faith; rabbinic tradition honours her as a prophet in her own right and reads her tent as a place of blessing. Her burial place at Machpelah in Hebron remains one of Judaism's holiest sites.
Christianity received Sarah as a model of faith, the letter to the Hebrews names her among those who trusted God's promise against the evidence, and Paul built an allegory on the two mothers, reading Sarah, the free woman, and Hagar, the slave, as figures of two covenants.
The relationship of the two women and their two sons carries the greatest weight of all. Islam honours the line of Ishmael, Hagar's son, as the ancestry of the Arabs and of the Prophet Muhammad, and the rituals of the hajj commemorate Hagar's desperate search for water for her child; Sarah is the mother of Isaac, from whom Israel descends. The household quarrel of Genesis thus stands, in the traditions that inherited it, at the head of the long relationship between the peoples that trace themselves to Abraham through his two sons and their two mothers.