6 answers to the claim that the Quran gets its history wrong

The charge says the Quran has Nimrod arguing with Abraham, although Nimrod belongs to a much earlier age, by some counts about seven centuries before him. The verse reads: “Have you not considered the one who argued with Abraham about his Lord, because God had given him kingship?” (Quran 2:258). It gives no name. The name Nimrod comes from the commentators, who took it from older traditions about Abraham’s confrontation with a tyrant, and al-Tabari reports it that way.^[1]

That distinction matters. The Quran asserts that a king disputed with Abraham, and it asserts nothing about when Nimrod lived. The Bible gives Nimrod as a mighty hunter and founder of the first cities of Mesopotamia, but it never places him in a conversation with Abraham.^[2] The gap of centuries is therefore a calculation from two outside chronologies, each of them uncertain, and the dates of Abraham himself are far from fixed.

If a commentator did equate this king with the Nimrod of Genesis, that equation can be questioned, and Muslim scholars have questioned it. Kingship was also often hereditary and titles passed down a dynasty, so a ruler in Abraham’s day could bear an older name. The verse stands without any of this.

The charge says the Quran puts Saul, called Talut, in the time of Moses. The verse says otherwise. It speaks of “the chiefs of the Children of Israel after Moses” who ask a prophet of theirs to appoint a king for them (Quran 2:246). The words “after Moses” place the scene later, and the sequel names Talut as the king, then tells how a young David killed Jalut, the Goliath of the Bible (2:247 to 251).^[3]

That order matches the Book of Samuel, where the elders ask Samuel for a king, Saul is anointed, and David defeats Goliath.^[4] The Quran leaves out Samuel’s name, calling him only “a prophet of theirs”, and says nothing of the century. The test of the soldiers at the river (2:249) has a different setting in the Book of Judges, where it is applied to Gideon’s men.

The reader who finds Saul in Moses’s day has misread “after” as “with”. A genuine puzzle remains for those who want a date, since the verses supply none. That is a fact about the Quran’s style, which names the lesson and leaves out the calendar.

The charge says the Quran makes Job a descendant of Abraham, although the Bible does not. The verse in question lists prophets “from his offspring”: David, Solomon, Job, Joseph, Moses and Aaron (Quran 6:84). The pronoun “his” has no single settled antecedent. The previous verse speaks of Abraham, and the one before it mentions Noah, and the commentators discussed which was meant.^[5]

The list itself is a clue. It includes Lot (6:86), who was the nephew of Abraham and no descendant, and it includes Jesus, who is a descendant only through his mother. The list is therefore a catalogue of prophets in the line of guidance, and it is not a strict family tree. If the pronoun refers to Noah, the difficulty disappears altogether.

Elsewhere the Quran says only that Job suffered, prayed to his Lord and was healed (21:83 to 84; 38:41 to 44).^[6] It gives him no ancestry. The Bible is also silent on the point, and Jewish tradition did not agree: the Talmud records opinions that Job lived in the days of Abraham, Jacob, Moses or even later.^[7] A claim that the Quran contradicts a fixed biblical date for Job has nothing to rest on.

The charge holds that crucifixion was a Roman or Persian punishment, so it cannot have been used by Pharaoh. In the story of the magicians who believed, Pharaoh threatens: “I will cut off your hands and your feet on opposite sides, and I will crucify you on the trunks of palm trees” (Quran 20:71; also 7:124 and 26:49).^[8] The Arabic verb is ṣallaba.

The verb describes fixing or hanging a body on a wooden support. In classical Arabic it covers the display of a body on a tree trunk or post, and the verse itself says the support is a palm trunk, which sounds more like impalement than the cross of Roman practice. English translators chose “crucify” because the word was close to hand. Bodies exposed on posts or trees were known in the ancient Near East, and the Bible records Pharaoh hanging his baker on a tree in the Joseph story.^[9]

The concession is that the Quran’s word later became the usual Arabic term for the Roman punishment, so a reader can hear more in it than the verse requires. Read as hanging or impaling on a trunk, it asks for nothing beyond what ancient rulers did.

The charge says the Quran calls Abraham, Solomon and others Muslims, and that Alexander is made a Muslim too, in an age before the religion existed. The Arabic word muslim means one who submits to God, and the Quran uses it of that meaning. Abraham was an upright muslim, and the verse adds that he was no Jew or Christian (Quran 3:67). The Queen of Sheba says, “I have submitted with Solomon to God, Lord of the worlds” (27:44). The disciples of Jesus say, “Bear witness that we are Muslims” (5:111).^[10]

The Quran says that the message of all the prophets was one, submission to God, and that “religion with God is Islam” (3:19).^[11] Writing about earlier prophets in the language of that message is a claim of continuity, and the Quran makes it openly. A critic is free to reject the claim, but a claim made on purpose is no slip of memory.

Alexander does not appear in this list by name. The Quran never names him, and the identification of Dhu al-Qarnayn with Alexander is one proposal among several, discussed in 6 Quranic stories and what other sources say.

The last group of charges lists absurd stories about the first humans: Satan as a jinn, Adam of enormous size, bald, cast down in India, and a crow that taught Cain to bury his brother. These need sorting by source. The Quran itself says Iblis “was of the jinn” (Quran 18:50) and tells of a raven that scratched the ground to show Cain how to hide his brother’s body (5:31).^[12] A similar tale appears in a Jewish midrashic work of disputed date, which shows a shared tradition and not the direction of influence.

Other items are outside the Quran. It names no tree, no place for the fall and no height for Adam. A saying in the collection of al-Bukhari describes Adam as sixty cubits tall, an authentic report that scholars read in different ways.^[13] Reports of Adam landing in India or of his baldness appear in commentaries and histories such as al-Tabari’s, and these are widely graded weak. A figure of 104 scrolls comes from one long report attributed to Abu Dharr, which many hadith scholars also grade weak; the Quran speaks only of the scrolls of Abraham and Moses.^[14] Embryology and stars thrown at devils are weighed in 7 scientific claims about the Quran, graded on the evidence and 5 verses about the natural world and how scholars read them.