Children of Israel: The Qurʾān’s Treatment of Jewish Ancestry

• In Event: Religious Authority in Precedence & Prophethood between Judaism & Islam

Abstract

The Qurʾānic appellation “Children of Israel” intimates the Qurʾān’s conception of its Jewish interlocutors as a genealogical entity and its adoption of the metaphor of family for Israel. This study explores the Qurʾān’s idiosyncratic usage of the genealogical designation for its Jewish addressees, which is a marked departure from its usually negative attitude towards ancestral precedent or legacy and its aversion to genealogical kinship. This paper begins with an exploration of the Qurʾān’s citation of Jacob-Israel’s deathbed bequest to his children in the preamble to the Medinan ummah forming verses (Q BAQARA 2:104−152). The Qurʾān’s deployment of this particular episode here has a strong polemical subtext in that it alienates the text’s Jewish interlocutors from Jacob-Israel’s soteriologically potent communal patrimony and in that it appropriates the sacred genealogies of Genesis into the emergent salvation history of its addressee-community, the proto-Muslims. Members of this new community, the Qurʾān argues, are the true children of Jacob-Israel and the true heirs to his bequest of divine grace and communal election. I argue that the Qurʾān’s recollection of the Biblical patriarch’s death is not an atrophied or misread borrowing from Genesis but rather a meaningful and polemically potent comment on the text’s emergent communal ideology. The paper explores how the Qurʾān re-works late ancient aggadah elaborating the Genesis account of Jacob-Israel’s bequest to his children (Gen. 49) and how it employs this biblical narrative to create space for its addressee-community in the economy of communal grace (faḍl). I propose that the Qurʾān’s polemic negotiations of late ancient Jewish communalism cannot be reduced to one supersessionary statement. Rather, it is comprised of a complex set of subtle subversions, contestations and appropriations that contour the text’s complex and multi-faceted polemical program.

author

• Hamza Zafer, University of Washington