Here is such an one that I recently encountered in Emanuel Swedenborg's “Arcana Coelestia,” volume 2, where he is interpreting the legend of Sara and Abram's development toward becoming Sarah and Abraham, and the birth in their “old age” of Isaac, “Laughter:”
“The case is
this: unless the knowledges, which in childhood have performed the
use of making the man rational, are destroyed, so that they are as
nothing, truth can never be conjoined with what is celestial. These
first memory-knowledges are for the most part earthly, corporeal, and
worldly.”
The Sara, Abram, Hagar, Ishmael, Sarah, Abraham, Isaac story is filled with all kinds of goodies about the development of the soul and of wisdom, and how such development requires an appreciation of it being absolutely necessary to get beyond materialism, the particles, the electrical impulses of the senses, in order to understand the message of dreams, myth, the symbolic.
This particular story was written down a couple thousand years after the supposed events happened, for which there is no archaeological evidence, and it was written in Hebrew, translated into Latin by Swedenborg, then much more recently translated into English. So, it seems clear to me that any attempt to relate the story to some “actual” or “historical” or “material” material events, has to be destroyed.
The name “Isaac” means “laughter.” That is a far more pregnant and interesting and useful and delightful vision than any number of speculations about the possibility of Sara/Sarah “actually” having a baby in her nineties.
Ingmar Bergman uses this story in his masterpiece, “Wild Strawberries,” my favorite film, drawing on Sara and Isaac. He names his protagonist “Isaac” and has Bibi Andersson as “Sara.”The film is available on YouTube in its entirety in excellent definition, but here is a short sample scene from it:
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