Quran

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.

Potiphar’s wife sets up her friends to learn about Joseph’s beauty for themselves, the hard way, in a story that appears in both rabbinic midrash and the Quran. Sefer HaYashar, a 16^th century midrashic work, dramatizes this story in a way sympathetic to her character, even giving her the name Zuleikha, borrowed from Islamic sources.

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.

Does the Supplementary Hypothesis explain the existence of a fourth son that found his way back into Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer and the Quran?

Today chesed is understood as an altruistic act of kindness. In the Bible, chesed and the parallel term noam refer to a covenantal arrangement between a powerful person or deity and their subject(s).