Sarai and Milcah

There has always been some uncertainty as to the blood relationship between Abraham and his wife Sarai. Abraham's statement to Abimelech king of Gerar in Gen. 20.12 "She is my sister: she is the daughter of my father but not of my mother: and she became my wife" has been taken to mean that Sarah was his half-sister, perhaps by a concubine to Terah, or by a second wife. Josephus, however, says that Sarah was a daughter of Haran, Abraham's eldest brother, and was therefore his niece. He says "...Abraham had two brothers, Nahor and Haran: of these Haran left a son, Lot, as also Sarai and Milcha his daughters, and died among the Chaldeans... These married their nieces. Nahor married Milcha, and Abram married Sarai" ("Antiquities" 1.6.5). Abraham's own words quoted above do not conflict with this, since the word for "daughter" is used for any female descendant of the family and what Abraham inferred might well be that Sarai was of his family although not a full sister in the strict sense of the word.

The source of Josephus' statement is unknown. There are many indications in his writings that he had access to a variant Hebrew O.T. text which is not now in existence. This might have set out the matter in more detail than does the Received O.T. Hebrew text on which our Authorised Version and most modern translations are based. In any case the information must have come in the first place from Gen. 11.27‑29 which reads in the A.V. ". ..Terah was the father of Abram, Nahor and Haran, and Haran was the father of Lot. Haran died before his father Terah, in the land of his birth in Ur of the Chaldees. And Abram and Nahor took wives: the name of Abram's wife was Sarai, and the name of Nahor's wife, Milcah, the daughter of Haran, the father of Milcah, and Iscah." According to this, Haran's daughterts were Milcah and Iscah, but this latter name is not mentioned anywhere else.

In this connection it has been noticed that there is a striking similarity between the Babylonian cuneiform, signs for Sarai and Iscah. It is now well established that the first eleven chapters of Genesis originally existed in cuneiform in something like the 23rd century BC and were translated into Hebrew at the time of Israel's sojourn in Egypt. "Iscah" in Akkadian is e‑su‑ka, the name of a minor god. It is very possible that the translator, working nearly a thousand years after the chapter was written, misinterpreted the sign for "Sarai" and rendered it "Iscah". The clay tablets in which the inscriptions are written are usually very small and the characters quite minute, so that errors in reading, even by modern decipherers, are quite frequent.

If there is any significance in this, the statement of Josephas is confirmed and an additional link forged in the chain of evidence pointing to the extreme antiquity of Genesis. If there had in fact been a daughter of Haran named Iscah, it would appear rather strange that nothing is said as to her future after Haran's death when that of both Milcah and Lot are described. If however Sarai should be read instead of Iscah the whole story becomes clear. Upon Haran's death his two brothers married his two daughters and one of them, Abram, took his son into his own household. Haran was sixty years older than Abram so he could well have had a daughter ten years younger, as was Sarah, who would then have been born to Haran in his seventieth year, not unusual in those times,