Did Muhammad know the Hebrew prophets? 6 answers from the Quran

The objection says the Quran never quotes David عليه السلام. The Quran names the book given to David, the Zabur (4:163, 17:55), and in one verse it quotes it: “We have written in the Zabur, after the reminder, that My righteous servants shall inherit the earth” (21:105).^[1]

Psalm 37:29 reads: “The righteous shall inherit the land and dwell upon it forever.” Verse 11 of the same psalm says that “the meek shall inherit the land”. The wording in 21:105 is close enough that commentators in both traditions have linked the two for centuries, and the Quran introduces it with “We have written in the Zabur“, the formula of a citation.^[2] It is the clearest case in the Quran of a sentence from the Hebrew Bible attributed to its source by name.

Jesus quotes the same psalm in the Sermon on the Mount: “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth” (Matthew 5:5). The Quran and the Gospel thus both draw on a single verse of David, each in its own words.^[3]

The objection grants that the Quran knows the names of David, Job and John the Baptist, and says that it knows nothing more. Each of the three has a story in the Quran, and each story matches its biblical counterpart at points a name alone could never supply.

David’s story in 38:21–25 is a parable of judgment. Two litigants climb over the wall of his prayer chamber. One says: “This is my brother; he has ninety-nine ewes and I have one ewe, and he said, entrust her to me, and he overpowered me in speech.” David judges that the brother has wronged him, then realises that he himself has been tried, falls down in repentance and is forgiven.^[4] In 2 Samuel 12 the prophet Nathan tells David of a rich man with many flocks who took a poor man’s single ewe lamb; David condemns the rich man and is told, “You are the man.” The setting and the moral differ in their details, since the Quran does not narrate the sin that the books of Samuel describe. The parable of the ewe, the judgment and the repentance are shared. The Quran also says that God taught David to make coats of mail and softened iron for him (21:80, 34:10–11), and that the mountains and birds joined in his praise (34:10), which echoes the Psalms’ call on mountains and birds to praise God (Psalm 148:9–10).^[5]

Job is described in 21:83–84 and 38:41–44. He calls out that harm has touched him, he is told to strike the ground with his foot and wash in a spring, and God restores his family to him “and the like of them with them”.^[6] The book of Job ends in the same way: “the Lord gave Job twice as much as he had before”, and he had again seven sons and three daughters (Job 42:10–13). The Quran praises his patience, sabr, which is the quality that the Letter of James also singles out: “You have heard of the steadfastness of Job” (James 5:11).

John the Baptist, Yahya, has the opening of Surah Maryam. Zechariah, old and with a barren wife, prays for an heir; he is given the good news of a son, asks how it can be, and is given a sign that he will not speak to people for three nights (19:2–11). The same events open the Gospel of Luke, where Zechariah is struck silent until the birth (Luke 1:5–22). Verse 3:39 adds that John would come “confirming a word from God, a leader, chaste, and a prophet from among the righteous”.^[7] A book that knew John only as a name would not have known his father’s age, his mother’s barrenness or his father’s silence.

The critic may answer that these stories are in the Gospels and the narrative books, and that the Quran does not quote them. That is correct, and the Quran gives its own account of each event. The question here was whether it knew more than the names, and the answer is that it knew the stories.

The objection says the Quran shows no knowledge of what earlier revelation taught. Its account of the Torah includes specific laws.

Verse 5:45 says: “We prescribed for them in it a life for a life, an eye for an eye, a nose for a nose, an ear for an ear, a tooth for a tooth, and wounds in retribution; but whoever forgoes it in charity, it is an expiation for him.” The law of retribution in Exodus 21:23–25 and Leviticus 24:19–20 has the same pairs, life for life, eye for eye and tooth for tooth.^[8] The Quran adds the option of forgoing the penalty, which Jewish law also developed through compensation.

Verse 5:32 says that God “decreed for the Children of Israel that whoever kills a soul, unless for a soul or for corruption in the land, it is as if he had slain mankind entirely, and whoever saves one, it is as if he had saved mankind entirely.” The same teaching appears in the Mishnah, tractate Sanhedrin 4:5, in the instruction given to witnesses in capital cases.^[9] The Quran attributes it to a decree for the Children of Israel, which is exactly where the Jewish tradition places it.

Verses 53:36–38 quote “the scrolls of Moses” on individual responsibility: “No bearer of burdens bears the burden of another.” Deuteronomy 24:16 says that fathers shall not be put to death for their children nor children for their fathers, and Ezekiel 18:20 states that “the son shall not bear the iniquity of the father”.^[10] These are not names repeated from hearsay. They are the substance of the law and of a writing prophet, Ezekiel, attributed to the scripture of Moses.

The objection says Muhammad was unaware that the writing prophets from Isaiah to Malachi existed. One of them is named in the Quran repeatedly.

Jonah is one of the twelve Minor Prophets in the Hebrew Bible, the collection that ends with Malachi. The Quran names him as Yunus in four verses and calls him “the man of the fish” (Dhu al-Nun, 21:87; sahib al-hut, 68:48). Surah 10 is named after him.^[11] Its account follows the Bible’s in its main lines: he was sent to a people, departed without leave, was swallowed by a fish, prayed from the darkness, was cast out on the shore, and returned to a town of more than a hundred thousand who believed (37:139–148). The Quran also preserves a detail that the book of Jonah stresses, that the town was spared after its repentance (10:98, compare Jonah 3:10).^[12]

The Prophet spoke about Jonah as well. Abu Hurayra and Ibn Abbas report that he said no one should say that he, Muhammad, was better than Yunus ibn Matta.^[13] “Matta” is the Arabic form of Amittai, the name of Jonah’s father in 2 Kings 14:25 and Jonah 1:1. A man who knew only the name of a prophet would not have known his father’s.

Elijah and Elisha, prophets of the books of Kings, also appear by name. The Quran records Elijah’s challenge to his people over the worship of Baal: “Do you call upon Baal and forsake the best of creators?” (37:123–125).^[14] That is the confrontation of 1 Kings 18, in two lines.

It is true that the Quran does not name Isaiah, Jeremiah or Ezekiel, and that it does not quote long passages from any prophetic book. The question is whether that silence shows ignorance.

The Quran explains how it chose its stories. “We relate to you the best of stories” (12:3), and “of them are those whose stories We have told you, and of them are those whose stories We have not told you” (40:78).^[15] It is not an anthology of earlier scripture. It is a new revelation that refers to earlier ones as witnesses and corrects them where it judges them altered. A book of that kind does not cite every predecessor, and the New Testament is a fair comparison: it never names Obadiah, Nahum or Zephaniah, and no reader concludes from that that its authors had not heard of them.

The Prophet also told his followers how to treat the books of the People of the Book. Abu Hurayra reports that the People of the Book read the Torah in Hebrew and explained it in Arabic to the Muslims, and the Prophet said: “Do not believe the People of the Book and do not disbelieve them. Say: We believe in God and in what was revealed to us.”^[16] A second report, from Abd Allah ibn Amr, has the Prophet say: “Narrate from the Children of Israel, and there is no harm in it.”^[17] These are rules for handling a body of material that the community knew existed and heard read.

Muslim scholars of the following centuries made use of it. Ibn Qutayba in the ninth century quoted passages of the Torah and the Psalms in Arabic, and Ibn Rabban al-Tabari, a convert from Christianity, cited Isaiah, Habakkuk and the Psalms at length in his Book of Religion and Empire. Ibn Taymiyya, in his reply to a Christian letter, quoted Isaiah repeatedly.^[18] The tradition that grew from the Quran did not ignore the writing prophets.

One more part of the Quran’s knowledge of earlier revelation deserves notice: its claim that the earlier books mention the Prophet. Verse 7:157 speaks of “the unlettered prophet whom they find written in what they have of the Torah and the Gospel”.^[19]

Muslims have pointed to Deuteronomy 18:18, the promise of a prophet “like Moses” from among the brethren of Israel, and to Isaiah 42, the servant who brings justice to the nations and on whom the coastlands wait. A report in al-Bukhari connects the second of these with the Prophet. Ata ibn Yasar asked Abd Allah ibn Amr to describe how the Prophet was portrayed in the Torah. Abd Allah replied with a description that combines a verse of the Quran (33:45) with the language of Isaiah 42: a witness, a bringer of good news and a warner, a refuge for the unlettered, God’s servant and messenger, “neither harsh nor coarse, nor one who raises his voice in the markets”.^[20] Isaiah 42:2 says of the servant: “He will not cry aloud or lift up his voice, or make it heard in the street.”

Christians read these passages differently, as they read the promise of a prophet like Moses differently, and both readings are argued on this site in their own article. The point here is narrower. A community that matched Isaiah’s description of the servant, phrase by phrase, against its Prophet knew what Isaiah had written.