The Bible and the Qurʾan

Abstract

The Qurʾan frequently alludes to material from the Hebrew Bible, New Testament, and post-biblical Christian or Jewish literature, referencing, echoing, and developing many figures, concepts, and themes from biblical tradition in the articulation of its message. These biblical motifs are often allotted slightly different shades of meaning than in their earlier Jewish or Christian contexts. Early scholarship on the Qurʾan’s engagement with biblical material sometimes sought to depict the relationship between the two corpora of texts as fundamentally one of dependence or plagiarism, whereby the Qurʾan is reliant upon or even derivative of earlier scriptures. In some cases, scholars have presented the Qurʾan or Muhammad as misconstruing or corrupting earlier traditions. However, an exploration of this intertextual relationship between the Bible and the Qurʾan need not seek to depict the Qurʾan as a patchwork of Christian and Jewish sources. Exploring the relationship between the Qurʾan and the Bible serves as an attempt to reconstruct the cultural and religious knowledge of the text’s initial audience and to highlight its creative adaptation of Jewish and Christian traditions for its own sectarian purposes, aligning them with the text’s didactic and theological message. A critical study of the Qurʾan therefore benefits from an intertextual reading through the texts, legends, and wider religious discourses circulating in its historical environment. Today academic scholars largely agree that the Qurʾan shares an intimate relationship with biblical traditions, but there is disagreement over the nature of this relationship. For example, they differ on whether scholars ought to give preference to Jewish or Christian sources to understand qurʾanic material, and they likewise debate whether the Qurʾan evinces direct knowledge of the Bible as a text or instead interacts with oral traditions, though most evidence seems to support the latter. Another element of debate is the Qurʾan’s view of the Bible: the text speaks of the divine origin of the Torah (al-tawrah) and the Gospel (al-injil), and in some instances the Qurʾan features challenges to his audience to consult a previous scripture (al-kitab), implied to be the Bible, or the “People of the Scripture” (ahl al-kitab), Christians and Jews, to confirm the veracity of its revelations (e.g., Q 10:94; 16:43; 21:7). In other cases, however, the Qurʾan seems to imply that Christians and Jews have fundamentally misunderstood or misused their scriptures (a concept known in Arabic as tahrif). Scholars also continue to debate to what extent the sophisticated methodologies developed from biblical studies, such as form criticism or redaction criticism, can be adopted wholesale into qurʾanic studies, or whether more analysis and methodological sophistication is needed before adopting these approaches to fit the history of the qurʾanic text.