I will make you exceedingly fruitful; and I will make nations of you, and kings shall come from you. I will establish my covenant between me and you, and your offspring after you'" (Genesis 17:4-7). Thus, the covenant is dependent not only on land, but also on dynasty. In other words, for the promise of the covenant to persist, procreation must occur so that there will be heirs to inherit the promise of the covenant and the physical land that goes with it, which makes Sarah's barrenness a significant issue. .
The significance of Sarah's barrenness is then revealed in the urgency surrounding it. This urgency is so great that after God first tells Abraham that he will have many descendents, Abraham, under Sarah's insistence, turns to Hagar to carry on his family (Genesis 16:1-4). This urgency is also present in the repetition of the type scene in the stories of Rachel and Hannah. For example, in the story of Rachel, Rachel reveals the extent of her urgency by proclaiming to Jacob, "Give me children, or I shall die!'" (Genesis 30:1) and, like Sarah, goes on to encourage Jacob to use her slave, Bilhah, to have children on Rachel's behalf. Hannah, on the other hand, displays her deep need for a child by praying to God so fervently that Eli mistakes her for being drunk and she has to explain that she has actually "been pouring out my soul before the LORD'" (1 Samuel 1:15). This retention of urgency through successive repetitions reveals the extent to which the Hebrew Bible is concerned with the physical realm of dynasty and inheritance of both covenant and land. .
The Greek Bible ultimately transforms this type scene of barren women by replacing it with a story of virginal pregnancy, and, in so doing, replacing inheritance of land with inheritance of the Kingdom of God. The story of virginal pregnancy present in the Greek Bible is the story of Mary's conception of Jesus. This story is explicitly connected to the type scene of the barren woman in the Hebrew Bible through the story's placement directly after the story of yet another barren woman, Mary's relative Elizabeth.