The epigraph is from Rumi, Poet and Mystic (1207-1275), Selections from His Writings, Translated from the Persian, with Introduction and Notes by the late Reynold A. Nicholson (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1950), p. 36.
1. The Tanakh and the Old Testament overlap massively but do not entirely coincide. Briefly, two ancient Jewish communities—one centered on Jerusalem, the other on Alexandria—determined two overlapping but not entirely coinciding canons or “tables of contents” for the Jewish Bible. It was the Alexandrian canon, a translation of the earlier Hebrew scriptures into Greek with significant additions, that became, first, the Bible for the Jewish Diaspora in Alexandria; later, the Bible for the newborn and substantially Grecophone Christian church; and, still later, once the maturing church had begun to write new scriptures for itself, the “Old Testament” for the emergent, two-testament Christian Bible. Thus did Christianity partly inherit and partly create its Bible.
Meanwhile, the Jerusalem canon lived on to become the Tanakh, Judaism’s Bible to this day. The Tanakh and the Old Testament differ not just by the slightly longer canon of the latter but, more important, by the latter’s sharply different eventual ordering of the constituent books. In the Christian Old Testament, the excitement and agitation of the biblical Prophets is moved to the end, just before the appearance of the Messiah in the Gospels, which open the New Testament. In the Jewish Tanakh, the Prophets are located in the middle, with other writings trailing behind, so that the order of appearance is Torah-Prophets-Writings. The initial letters of those three words in Hebrew—T + N + K—stand behind Tanakh as a pronounced acronym.
In God: A Biography (Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), I wrote about God as the protagonist of the Tanakh. When writing about the Qur’an, I find it preferable to use the term Old Testament or, more often, simply Bible when referring to the older scriptures. The reason is that although in the Qur’an Allah refers to “Torah” (rather than to either Old Testament or Tanakh) and to “Gospel” (rather than to New Testament) and although He clearly understands Jews and Christians to belong to different groups, He also often refers to “the Book” as a singular object and to Jews and Christians together as “People of the Book.” In the process, He rather fuses their earlier scriptures as jointly superseded by His Qur’an. The “Book” of the “People of the Book” thus appears most plausibly to be the two-testament Christian Bible; and in this book, when I use the term Bible, I will use it in this sense. The term Tanakh is best used, I believe, when the New Testament is entirely out of the interpretive picture and the Hebrew scriptures are engaged either alone or in tandem with their true complement in later Jewish literature—namely, Talmud and Midrash.
A final note: in the sixteenth century, Protestantism deleted from the canon of what would become its Old Testament all books, or parts of books, that were not included in the Tanakh. However, the Protestants retained the order of the earlier Christian Old Testament as well as its practice of translating Hebrew yhwh, the divine proper name, as Greek Kyrios or Latin Dominus, yielding LORD in English. The hybrid result is the Old Testament that is familiar to readers of the King James Version and its many descendants in English.
2. On this repugnance, see Omar Saif Ghobash, “Advice for Young Muslims: How to Survive in an Age of Extremism and Islamophobia,” Foreign Affairs, January/February 2017, adapted from his book Letters to a Young Muslim (Picador, 2017).
3. “ ‘A New Amalek Is Appearing,’ Netanyahu warns at Auschwitz. ‘Never again will we allow the hand of evil to sever the life of our people,’ says PM, in veiled reference to Iranian threat,” Jerusalem Post, January 10, 2010.
4. Let me mention a few:
Carol Bakhos, The Family of Abraham: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Interpretations (Harvard University Press, 2014).
Reuven Firestone, Journeys in Holy Lands: The Evolution of the Abraham-Ishmael Legends in Islamic Exegesis (State University of New York Press, 1990).
Robert C. Gregg, Shared Stories, Rival Tellings: Early Encounters of Jews, Christians, and Muslims (Oxford University Press, 2015).
John Kaltner, Ishmael Instructs Isaac: An Introduction to the Qur’an for Bible Readers (The Liturgical Press, 1999).
Michael Lodahl, Claiming Abraham: Reading the Bible and the Qur’an Side by Side (Brazos Press, 2010).
Jane Dammen McAuliffe, editor, The Cambridge Companion to the Qur’ān (Cambridge University Press, 2006).
Geoffrey Parrinder, Jesus in the Qur’an (Oneworld Publications, 2013).
F. E. Peters, A Reader on Classical Islam (Princeton University Press, 1994).
Gabriel Said Reynolds, The Qur’ān and Its Biblical Subtext (Routledge, 2010). I regret that Reynolds’s The Qur’an and the Bible: Text and Commentary (Yale University Press, 2018) appeared too late for me to consult.
Zeki Saritoprak, Islam’s Jesus (University Press of Florida, 2014).
Roberto Tottoli, Biblical Prophets in the Qur’an and Muslim Literature (Curzon, 2001).
5. Muslim tradition understands the Qur’an to have existed from all time as the “Preserved Tablet.” Jewish tradition similarly understands Torah to have existed from all time. Similarly, again, Christian tradition understands Jesus to have existed from all time as the Logos—the Word or the Mind—of God. In all three cases, the pre-existent entity precedes the creation of the world. Historical understanding, by contrast with all three, is time-bound. For more on the strength and limitation of historical understanding of the Qur’an, see the afterword, pp. 192–211.
6. Seyyed Hossein Nasr, editor-in-chief, The Study Quran: A New Translation and Commentary, (New York: HarperOne, 2015), p. xxxi.
7. The Qur’an, A New Translation, trans. Tarif Khalidi (New York: Penguin Books/Penguin Classics, 2009), p. xxi. Like nearly all Qur’an translations into English, the Penguin Classics Qur’an occasionally finds it necessary to insert an English word in [square brackets] to clarify the Arabic. On a few occasions, when I find it helpful to insert a further word, I do so in {bow brackets}. On a few occasions, I do this as well with the New Jerusalem Bible.
8. Cf. Bruce B. Lawrence, The Koran in English, A Biography (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), especially chapters 2 and 6.
9. While I do not know Arabic, I do know three related Semitic languages, a general linguistic familiarity that has eased my occasional consultation of A Concordance of the Qur’an by Hanna E. Kassis (Oakland, Calif.: University of California Press, 1983; foreword by Fazlur Rahman). This concordance tracks the English of A. J. Arberry’s The Koran Interpreted (London: Allen and Unwin, 1955) through the underlying Arabic roots to the morphologically derived forms and then onward to the locations of these in the affected passages of the Qur’an. The process is intricate but can significantly enrich a reader’s grasp of nuance when and where nuance matters most. The reader may also use its index of proper names to visit every reference to a biblical figure who is also named in the Qur’an.
10. Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Washington Square Press, 1962), abridgment by D. M. Low, p. 825.
“While the state [the Roman Empire in the East] was exhausted by the Persian war, and the church was distracted by the Nestorian and Monophysite sects, Mahomet, with the sword in one hand and the Koran in the other, erected his throne on the ruins of Christianity and of Rome.”
1. On a few occasions, this being one, the two Hebrew names appear in sequence. The Jerusalem Bible translates “Yahweh God.”
2. https://www.dartmouth.edu/~milton/reading_room/.
3. Blake produced a series of twenty pen-and-watercolor illustrations of scenes from John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Five of these, including this one, were exhibited at the Huntington Gallery as part of an exhibition entitled Drawn to Paradise: Picturing the Bible from the 16th to the 19th Centuries (San Marino, California, July 1 to October 23, 2017).
4. Dr. Piero Ferrucci explains that the ig- prefixed to nudo is not the in- of negation or privation but is rather d’appoggio, “of support”—of support, that is, to the smooth flow of pronunciation that Italian ever favors. He offers as a comparable example the Italian word for history, which may take the form either of storia or of istoria, depending on its phonetic environs. Over time, a nuance of difference does seem to have accrued to ignudo, but it is not a nuance of humiliation or reprobation (as in ignoble and ignominious) but only of deprivation. A rough English equivalent in this sense might be bare or meager—that is, lacking in some regard.
5. https://www.dartmouth.edu/~milton/reading_room/.
6. Ibid.
7. John Milton, Paradise Regained, the Minor Poems, and Samson Agonistes, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (The Odyssey Press, 1937), p. 504.
8. James H. Charlesworth, ed., The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, vol. 2 (New York: Doubleday, 1985), p. 262. The translation of Life of Adam and Eve is edited and translated by M. D. Johnson. His commentary includes a discussion of the likely Hebrew original for the Life. In the passage quoted, Johnson italicizes breath of life and the first occurrence only of image of God. The other italicizations are my addition.
Christianity—founded by Jews—preserved a number of Jewish texts that Rabbinic Judaism, developing alongside it, discarded. The Life of Adam and Eve is one such text and reflects the fact that belief in Satan as the personification of all that opposes God took hold more quickly and more solidly in early Christian tradition than in Rabbinic tradition of the same period. Later Talmudic and post-Talmudic tradition, however, would also recognize Satan as the dark master of the sitra ’ahra or “other side.” See the appendix.
9. Dan O’Brien, Scarsdale, Poems (Evansville, Ind.: Measure Press, 2015), p. 8. Who is the “God’s brother” addressed in this poem? It could be the speaker, who in arrogating to himself a judicial power proper to God, is implicitly claiming to be at least God’s brother. Or it could be the older boy, older than the speaker “by ages,” who, claiming only to be related to God, rebukes the younger boy for claiming to be God Himself. Is the Islamic sin of shirk committed whenever one mere human being presumes to judge another?
10. At Genesis 3:4–5, the serpent tells Eve that, contrary to what Yahweh has said, Adam and she will not die if they eat the forbidden fruit:
No! You will not die! God knows in fact that the day you eat it your eyes will be opened and you will be like gods, knowing good from evil.
But against this New Jerusalem Bible translation, I prefer the Jewish Publication Society Tanakh version, which reads:
You are not going to die, but God knows that as soon as you eat of it your eyes will be open and you will be like divine beings who know good and bad.
At issue for me is the difference between “good from evil” and “good and bad.” The former is the knowledge of a distinction; the latter may be something more like the knowledge of a giant inventory. It may be that the Hebrew tov vara’—literally “good and bad”—is an instance of the rhetorical device called hendiadys or “one through two.” In other words, it may be an expression like “soup to nuts” or “A to Z” signaling completeness. If so, then the Serpent in Genesis promises Eve that Adam and she will become divine by knowing everything.
And in that case, we have a point of sharp contrast between Genesis, where the first couple is punished for aspiring to know everything, and the Qur’an, where Adam (notably, not Eve) is actually taught everything, at least if “the names” is properly taken to stand for “everything” in Qur’an 2:31.
11. The Study Quran, p. 1114.
12. Eric Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, 15th anniversary edition, trans. Willard R. Trask, with a new introduction by Edward W. Said (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953, 2003), p. 157.
13. Ibid., p. 158.
14. Ibid., p. 156.
1. “The man” in Hebrew is ha’adam. The article, “the,” is ha; the noun, “man,” is ’adam. This personage, ha’adam, will not lose the ha and become simply ’adam, “Adam,” until Genesis 4:25: “Adam had intercourse with his wife, and she gave birth to a son [their third] whom she named Seth.” By this point, it seems that Eve, who has named all three boys, may have coined a name for her husband, their father, as well—not an especially original name, but a real one. But, again, the usage here is really that of the mysterious narrator.
2. To gloss briefly:
—unhousel’d: having not received the sacrament of Holy Communion;
—disappointed: unprepared, as by repentance and confession;
—unanel’d: “un-oiled,” not having received the final sacramental anointing with oil.
3. Michael Lodahl, Claiming Abraham: Reading the Bible and the Qur’an Side by Side (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Brazos Press, 2010), p. 109.
1. As part of the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles: www.skirball.org/noahs-ark.
2. Cf. Genesis 12:7: “Yahweh appeared to Abram and said, ‘I shall give this country to your progeny.’ ”
3. For the original text, part of the Chester Cycle of mystery plays, visit www.chestermysteryplays.com/history/history/texts_iframe.html [inactive].
The eminent twentieth-century British composer Benjamin Britten produced a musical adaptation of the play, which he entitled Noye’s Fludde, suitable for performance by children. A summer performance of Noye’s Fludde in a church on a wooded island off the coast of New England is the setting for the 2012 film Moonrise Kingdom.
1. James H. Charlesworth, ed., The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha (New York: Doubleday, 1983), p. 693.
2. Confusingly, the place Haran and the man Haran share the same name, though this does not seem to be in any way a meaningful coincidence. Cf. Jacob Neusner, Confronting Creation: How Judaism Reads Genesis: An Anthology of Genesis Rabbah (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991).
1. On this shift through its many phases, see Jon D. Levenson, The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son: The Transformation of Child Sacrifice in Judaism and Christianity (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995).
2. Pirkê de Rabbi Eliezer (The Chapters of Rabbi Eliezer the Great) According to the Text of the Manuscript Belonging to Abraham Epstein of Vienna, trans. and annotated with an introduction and indices by Gerald Friedlander (Hermon Press, 2009), p. 227.
3. Ibid., p. 224.
1. Ghazal (Ode) no. 1827, translated by William C. Chittick in his book Sufism: A Beginner’s Guide (Oxford, UK: Oneworld, e-book edition 2011), pp. 89–90. I am indebted to my friend and colleague Amir Hussain for drawing this beautiful poem to my attention.
2. Quoted in Bruce B. Lawrence, The Koran in English, A Biography (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), p. 69. Lawrence notes that shortly before making this statement, Asad has quoted Sura 102 in his own translation, but back at the time of the conversion, which occurred in Berlin, Asad (then still Leopold Weiss) had not yet learned Arabic and so must have been reading a translation—probably, Lawrence astutely infers, a German translation of the earlier twentieth-century translation by Muhammad Ali.
1. For a cogent and original account of the Levites’ role in the Exodus and the later life of Israel, see Richard Elliott Friedman, The Exodus (San Francisco: HarperOne/HarperCollins, 2017).
1. The New York Times, December 24, 1995.
2. As a shrine to “Holy Wisdom,” the basilica is most probably to be understood as a shrine to Christ as the Logos or Word of God. Cf. the opening words of the Gospel of John: “In the beginning was the Word, the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Divine Wisdom and the Divine Word, either phrase a metonymy for Divine Thought, were easily interchangeable, at least partly because in the Old Testament Book of Proverbs, Wisdom, personified as feminine, states that she too has been with God from the very beginning. This very association, however, can also suggest either that Mary, identified with this feminine principle, was also somehow with God from the beginning or, as in contemporary feminist theology, that God can be imagined no less readily as feminine than as masculine.
3. Gordon D. Newby, A Concise Encyclopedia of Islam (Oxford, UK: Oneworld Publications, 2002), p. 195, on shirk: “This is the sin of associating another deity with ALLÂH, the most severe sins mentioned in the QUR’ÂN. Polytheism is the one sin that cannot be forgiven, according to the Qur’an.” On “no two powers in heaven,” see Alan F. Segal, Two Powers in Heaven: Early Rabbinic Reports About Christianity and Gnosticism (repr., Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2012).
4. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Washington Square Press, 1962), abridgment by D. M. Low, p. 866.
5. A Tale of Two Cities (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1948), p. 416.
1. Wilfred Cantwell Smith, On Understanding Islam, Selected Studies (The Hague, Netherlands: Mouton, 1981).
2. Emmanuel Carrère, The Kingdom (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), p. 5.
3. Confessions: A New Translation, trans. Peter Constantine, with foreword by Jack Miles (New York: Liveright, 2018), p. 121.
4. Carrère, The Kingdom, pp. 103–4.
5. Smith, On Understanding Islam, p. 285.
6. Ibid., p. 291.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid., pp. 292–3.
9. I wish to acknowledge my indebtedness to the prophets Yirmiyahu, Yehezkel, and Hosea for first drawing this analogy to my attention.
10. On Understanding Islam, p. 298.
11. Todd Boss, “It Is Enough to Enter” in Pitch, Poems (New York: W.W. Norton, 2012), p. 15.
12. The founders of Christianity, all of them Jews, believed that the Second Coming of Christ was imminent. When that hoped-for event failed to happen as soon as expected, Saint Paul, the most important of them, concluded in his Letter to the Romans that Christ would return only after all the nations of the world except the Jews had become Christian. Christ would return after that universal conversion, and only then would the Jews come around at last. Centuries of persecution might have been averted had Christians taken chapters 9 through 11 of Saint Paul’s Letter to the Romans to heart, for Paul, rather than merely resigned to an indefinite postponement of the conversion of the Jews, saw this very postponement as a part of God’s grand plan. After sharing his vision of the End Times, he cries out joyously:
How rich and deep are the wisdom and the knowledge of God! We cannot reach to the root of his decisions or his ways. Who has ever known the mind of the Lord? Who has ever been his adviser? Who has given anything to him, so that his presents come only as a debt returned? Everything there is comes from him and is caused by him and exists for him. To him be glory for ever! Amen. (Romans 11:33–36; the italicized sentences are quotes from elsewhere in scripture.)
13. Cf. Reuven Firestone, Journeys in Holy Lands, The Evolution of the Abraham-Ishmael Legends in Islamic Exegesis (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), p. 157:
When the Jews of Medina criticize Muhammad for reciting legends which they considered inaccurate, they call our attention to the probability that by virtue of their oral nature, the legends Muhammad faithfully retold had evolved to the point that they no longer corresponded well to the written version known to educated Rabbinite Jews in the Bible and the Midrash. For his part, Muhammad sincerely believed that he knew the legends correctly….In the context of his relations with the Jews of Medina, Muhammad’s attitude can hardly be construed as anything but genuine anger and even shock at what he considered the complete Jewish disregard for the true story. The Qur’an portrays the tension resulting from two different versions of parallel scriptural tales. Each version is claimed by separate parties as being the unchangeable word of God. The standard against which the Medinan Jews judged the legends and sermons recited by Muhammad would have been their Hebrew Bible and Midrash, although they were undoubtedly familiar with the versions to which Muhammad referred as well. Muhammad’s was a version known in oral form in Mecca and Medina and common to Jews and Christians as well as his followers and Arab pagans. Muhammad’s anger at their rejection was not merely a reaction to personal insult, but rather a natural response to the rejection of what he believed was authentic scripture, which indeed it was, although not identical to the scripture that the Jews considered authentic.
14. Quoted from JPS Hebrew-English Tanakh (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1985). If I were Jewish, the New Jerusalem Bible, a Catholic Bible, would not be my translation of choice.
15. “Radical Editing: Redaktionsgeschichte and the Aesthetic of Willed Confusion” in The Creation of Sacred Literature, ed. Richard Elliott Friedman (Oakland: University of California Press, 1981).
16. George Steiner, Real Presences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 227.