'ויהיו חיי שרה וגו, “the lives of Sarah were, etc.” the description of Sarah having had more than one life must be understood as follows: during the first ninety years of her life she had been childless. Anyone who has no children is really considered as if dead. When you look at the numerical value of the letters in the word ויהיו the total is 37. This is the Torah’s way at showing us that the last thirty seven years of Sarah’s life were really the ones that counted.

חיי שרה, “the lives of Sarah;” according to Rashi all the years that Sarah lived on this earth were equal in the sense that she was a good person during all these years. When we look at the way the Torah describes the years of Yishmael after his death, (Genesis 25,17) the Torah describes them in the same terms, i.e. ואלה שני חיי ישמעאל מאת שנה ושלושים שנה ושבע שנים; does Rashi imply that the Torah compliments Yishmael in the same manner as it complimented Sarah? When we accept that the word ואלה, “and these,” are a hint that he had become a penitent, as Rashi derives from the manner in which his burial is described in the Torah in same verse from the fact that he is described as having been gathered into his forefathers, and we know that a proselyte is considered as if newly born from the day of his conversion, i.e. free from sin, it follows that the years he had lived prior to this have now been converted as a prelude to his conversion, i.e. as part of that conversion process. Another way of explaining the Torah’s wording of the death and burial of Yishmael: the Torah did not preface his death with the unusual words: “and the lives of Sarah were,“ words which alert us that they must have more meaning than the plain text suggests. When Sarah’s death is reported the word חיי, “lives of,” is mentioned twice, not only once. This calls for closer examination. Rashi, therefore was quite correct in alerting his readers to this.

בקרית ארבע, “in the town or village known as the city of the “four.” The word ארבע is the name of the person after whom the town was named as is stated in Joshua 14,15: קרית ארבע האדם הגדול בענקים, “the town of Arba, the great man among the Anakites.”

ויענו בני חת, “the members of the tribe of the Hittites, replied;” on these words Rabbi Elazar commented that untold numbers of pens have been broken and untold amounts of ink have been used up for the Torah to repeat the expression בני חת, “the members of the tribe of the Hittites, in this paragraph no fewer than ten times. Our sages say that we learn from here that anyone who assists a righteous person to receive his due share is viewed as if he had observed the commandments in all the Five Books of Moses. We find in Kings II 4,42, as similar –apparently unnecessary repetition- when told: ואיש בא מבעל שלשה ויבא לאיש האלוקים לחם, בכורים, עשרים לחם שעורים וכרמל בצקלו ויאמר: תן לעם ויאכלו. “A man came from Baal-shalisha and he brought the man of G–d some bread from the first reaping- twenty loaves of barley bread and some fresh grain, in his sack; and Elisha said: give it to the people to eat.” (The prophet in this paragraph was Elisha) Anyone reading this paragraph must wonder was Elisha then a priest that the bikkurim would be brought to him? The answer given is that when someone brings a Torah scholar a gift it is considered by our sages as if that person had personally erected the Temple and had offered the first fruit, bikkurim, therein (Talmud tractate Ketuvot folio 105). We find a third occasion when unnecessary repetition seems to occur in the Bible in the Book of Joshua (Joshua 7,10) in connection with Achan who had stolen from the loot of Jericho; in that report the word גם is repeated five times, though it could easily been avoided. On that occasion our sages interpret the constant repetition of the word גם by saying that it teaches that if someone steals property belonging to the Temple treasure it is considered as if he had transgressed all the commandments of the Five Books of Moses. Another way of looking at this particular example: If you take the respective first and last letters in the last letter of each of the five Books of Moses, i.e. the letters ב-ם from the last word in the Book of Genesis במצרים, plus the letters מ-ם in the word מסעיהם at the end of the Book of Exodus, plus the letters ס-י from the word סיני at the end of the Book of Leviticus, plus the two letters י-ר of the word יריחו at the end of the Book of Numbers, i.e. ס-י from the word סיני at the end of the Book of Numbers, plus the letters י-ל from the word ישראל at the end of the Book of Deuteronomy you will have the numerical value of the word חרם=248. The sin of Achan was stealing from חרם, from what belongs to G–d. (Attributed to Sefer Chassidim page 106, (in the edition with Rabbi Price’s commentary)