Prophethood, Marriageable Consanguinity, and Text: The Problem of Abraham and Sarah's Kinship Relationship and the Response of Jewish and Islamic Exegesis

Abstract

The story of Abraham hiding his marital relationship with Sarah from a threatening authority in a foreign land occurs twice in Genesis and is treated in some detail in both Jewish and Islamic exegetical literature. The biblical renditions of the story raise questions about the character of the patriarch when they portray him as either lying about his relationship with Sarah, or as having engaged in a forbidden (incestuous) marital union. Both Jewish and Islamic exegesis respond to these problems. Although it has often been suggested that Islamic tradition is dependent upon Jewish tradition, the nature of the exegetical responses to the problem of Abraham and Sarah's kinship suggests that Muslim religious scholars evolved a uniquely Islamic exegesis within a shared realm of religious and literary discourse during the early Islamic period