Islam

God promises Abram that his descendants will be as numerous as the stars of the sky, assumed to be uncountable. In 10^th century Baghdad, scholars were well-versed in Ptolemy’s Greek astronomy, including his official limited count of stars. This challenged the Karaite Jewish exegete Ya‘qub al-Qirqisani to reinterpret the meaning of God’s promise.

After Abram expresses doubt that Sarai will have children and questions how he can be sure his descendants will inherit the land, YHWH establishes the Covenant of the Pieces, lasting 400 years, extending through Israel’s time in Egypt up to their entry into the land. Does this covenant hold lasting significance for later generations, or is it replaced by God’s “everlasting” Covenant of Circumcision?

In his famous essay on Moses, Asher Ginsberg (Ahad Ha’am 1856–1927), an influential Zionist thinker, recasts the revelation at the burning bush as Moses encountering his internal voice. His heroic Moses is shadowed by other, more melancholic figures, such as Jeremiah, and even Muhammad, as imagined by Thomas Carlyle. Rather than a figure of strength and power, Ahad Ha’am’s Moses comes to express the anxieties and ambivalences of early Zionism.

Genesis describes Nimrod as a great hunter before YHWH and a powerful king. In late Second Temple writings, Nimrod is connected to the Tower of Babel and seen as a rebel against God. This negative view of Nimrod persisted through the centuries in the writings of the Church Fathers, and was further expanded in rabbinic midrash and medieval Islamic literature.

Abraham banishes Ishmael as a lad, and the break between them seems final. To reconcile father and son, Jewish and Islamic traditions tell a story about Abraham going to visit Ishmael and meet his wives. Despite being similar, the two stories are used for different purposes.

The Quran makes multiple intertextual connections with the Shema and its rabbinic commentary in its qiblah (“direction”) passages, thus highlighting a point of agreement between Jews and Muslims: Prayer is not about the physical direction you face but about loving God with all your heart.

In the Bible, the Queen of Sheba is an unnamed foreign visitor to Solomon’s court. How did she later become a paradigmatic religious convert, Solomon’s wife, and the mother of Nebuchadnezzar and Menelik I, the founding figure of the Ethiopian royal court? The answer begins in the Qur’an.