The Monotheists: Jews, Christians, and Muslims in Conflict and Competition, Volume I: The Peoples of God

THE MONOTHEISTS

THE MONOTHEISTS

JEWS, CHRISTIANS, AND MUSLIMS IN CONFLICT AND COMPETITION

The Peoples of God

F. E. Peters

Princeton University PressPrinceton and Oxford

Copyright © 2003 by Princeton University Press

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Peters, F. E. (Francis E.)

The monotheists : Jews, Christians, and Muslims in conflict and competition / F. E. Peters.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents: v. 1. The peoples of God—v. 2. The words and will of God.

eISBN: 978-1-40082-570-7

1. Judaism—Relations—Christianity—History. 2. Christianity and other

religions —Judaism —History. 3. Judaism—Relations—Islam—History.

4. Islam—Relations—Judaism—History. 5. Islam—Relations—Christianity—History.

6. Christianity and other religions—Islam—History. I. Title.

BM535 .P32 2003

291.1'72—dc21 2002042462

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

This book has been composed in Janson

Printed on acid-free paper. ∞

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1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

For

Peter Paul Peters,

good man, great son

Contents

Preface

Introduction

1. THE COVENANT: FROM ISRAELITE TO JEW

A Prologue on Earth

The Quran’s Account of Early Humanity

History Begins

Faith and Act

A Holy Land

Hagar and Ishmael

Ishmaelites and Arabs

Hebron

Isaac and the Covenant

Claims and Counterclaims

Jacob’s Dream at Bethel

The Name(s) and Nature of God

The Builder Kings

The Temple as Haram

The Sanctity of Jerusalem

A Troubled Legacy

The Samaritan Schism

The Voice of the Prophets

A Harsh Theodicy and an Uncertain Future

Judaea and Ioudaioi

The Passage of Power and Prestige

Second Temple Sectarianism

Words and the Word of Wisdom

A Cure for Transcendence ?

The Harvest of Hellenism

Jews in Diaspora

The Word of God

Personification and Hypostatization

Satan from Prince of Darkness to Desert Demon

Apocalypticism: Unveiling the End

A Message of Hope

Second Temple Messianism

The Son of Man

2. THE GOOD NEWS OF JESUS

The Dossier on Jesus

The Historical Jesus and the Christ of History

The Gospels

Luke and History

Jesus: A Life

Born Again

The Ministry

The Last Days

The End and the Beginning

Jesus the Messiah

Jesus in the Quran

The Jewish and the Muslim Jesus

The Kingdom

After the Crucifixion

Saul/Paul

Paul’s Jesus

The Resurrection

Christology

Ebionites and Docetists

The Apostle of the Gentiles

Paul and Judaism

Jewish Christianity

Judaizers

Paul: Jerusalem to Rome

The Great War and Its Aftermath

Earthly Messiahs

Later Jewish Messiahs

Sabbatai Zvi

3. MUHAMMAD THE PROPHET OF GOD

The Muhammad of History

When God Speaks

Hagiography and History

Mecca and Its Gods

The Meccan Haram

The Kaaba

Muhammad: A Life

The Message of Islam

Sacred History

The Bible and the Quran

The Opposition

The Satanic Verses

Muhammad’s Night Journey and Ascension

Boycott

The Hegira

Medina

The Medina Accords

Muhammad and the Jews

The Religion of Abraham

The Master of Medina (624–628)

The Practice of Islam

Muhammad and the Jews (continued)

The Lord of Arabia (628–632)

Muhammad and the Jews (concluded)

The Wives and Children of the Prophet

The Opening of Mecca

Problems before and after Tabuk

The Last Years (631–632)

Muhammad and Jesus: Some Points of Comparison

The Career of Mecca

4. A KINGDOM OF PRIESTS

Identity Markers

In and Out

Kinship and Covenant

Be You Holy As I Am Holy

What Is a Jew?

Conversion and Clientage

Becoming a Christian

Jew and Greek

Religious Tolerance: The Romans on Jews and Christians

The World Turns Christian

Religious Tolerance: Christians on Pagans and Jews

The Need of Baptism, and of the Church

Augustine and the Donatists

Consensual and Coerced Conversion

The Jews of Western Christendom

The Talmud on Trial

Christians, Muslims, and Jews in Spain

The Christian War on Islam: Peter the Venerable and Ramon Lull

What of the Infidels?

Muslims, Christians . . . and Other Christians in the Balkans

Naming the Others

The Making of a Muslim

An Arab, and Arabic, Islam

Islam and the Associators: The Hindu Case

5. ORTHODOXY AND HERESY

In Search of Jewish Orthodoxy

Exclusion and Banishment

The Separation of the Christians

Easter

Defining the Truth

Reaching for Orthodoxy: The Fundamental Principles of Jewish and Muslim Belief

Heresy in the Early Churches

Gnosticism

The Rule of Faith

Heresy, Witchcraft, and Reform

The Church of the Saints: The Cathars

The Albigensian Crusade

The Holy War against Heresy

The Secular Tribunal

Sleeping with the Enemy

The Spanish Inquisition

Who Possesses the Truth?

Papal Heresy

The Umma Divided: Sects and Sectarianism in Early Islam

Heresiography and Comparative Religion

Innovation and Heresy

Taking the Measure of Early Islamic Sectarians

Defining the Umma: The Sunni View of Islam

Sunnis and Shiites

The Zindiq Inquisition

The Enemy Within: Ibn Taymiyya

Fundamentalists as the Faithful Remnant

Catholic Judaism

Shades of Black: Orthodox Judaism

6. COMMUNITY AND AUTHORITY

A People Called Israel

A Kingdom Called Israel

After the Exile

Zionism

A New Political Order

Patriarch and Exilarch

The Geonim

Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews

The Christian Ekklesia

Bishops and Priests

Hierarchy and Structure

Councils of Bishops, Local and Ecumenical

The Laity

The Primacy of Rome

Western and Eastern Christianity and Christendom

The Competition for Souls

Pope, Patriarch, and the Bulgarian Church

The Parting of the Ways, East and West

A Misbegotten Crusade

Church Reunion

A Papal Crisis: Celestine and Boniface

The Popes without Rome: Avignon

The Great Western Schism

Pisa and Constance

Conciliarism

The Papacy under Attack: Marsiglio of Padua and William of Ockham

The Voice of the Council: Haec sancta and Frequens

The Emperor and the Pope

Better the Turban of the Turk . . .

Moscow, the Third Rome

Reformation and Counter-Reformation

The Radical Reformation: The Anabaptists

The Confessional Churches

7. CHURCH AND STATE: POPES, PATRIARCHS, AND EMPERORS

The Jewish Experience: From State to Church

Render to Caesar . . .

The Christians and the Empire

The Persecutions

Constantine

The Contest Begins: Ambrose and the Emperor

The City of God and the City of Man

Two There Are . . .

How the Pope Became a Prince

The College of Cardinals and the Roman Curia

How the Prince Became a Priest

Rome Redivivus: The Holy Roman Empire

The Two Swords: Gregory VII and Henry IV

The Papacy versus Frederick II

The Reformation as Political Event

Luther and the Princes

Calvin’s Two Kingdoms

Church and State in the Counter-Reformation

The Papal States

8. THE CHURCH AS THE STATE: THE ISLAMIC COMMUNITY

The Umma

Holy War: The Islamic Case

War and Religion: The Jewish and Christian Cases

Dhimma and Dhimmis

Muslim Dhimmis in Christian Spain

Conversion by Levy: The Devshirme

The Millet System

The Caliphate

The Powers of the Caliph (and Others)

Tensions in the Community

Ali ibn Abi Talib (601–661)

The Succession

The Umayyads (r. 661–750)

The Holy Family: Ahl al-Bayt

The Abbasids (r. 750–1258)

From Alidism to Shiism

The Shiite Imamate

Sunnis and Shiites

The Hidden Imam

Political Ismailism: The Fatimids

Apocalyptic Ismailism—The Qarmatians

The Sultanate

The Ottomans and a Universal Caliphate

The End of the Caliphate

Iran as a Shiite State

The Shiite Ulama and the State

The Islamic Republic of Iran

An Early Modern Christian Theocracy: Reform Geneva

END THOUGHTS

Civics and Civility

Capital and Other Crimes

Making Jews

Making Christians

Making Muslims

A Crucial Difference

Index

Preface

IN 1982 I WROTE a small book called Children of Abraham. In it I attempted to put the three monotheistic faith communities of Jews, Christians, and Muslims in a comparative context. The work was undertaken before the appearance of my annotated collection of texts, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam: The Classical Texts and Their Interpretation, and my repeated use of this latter book in the classroom. I have taught a course on the combustible mix of Jews, Christians, and Muslims in every academic orbit for more than twenty years, and have lectured on one or another aspect of the subject in a variety of venues across the country. I have learned a great deal not only from my own research and study but from listening to student and audience reactions, and even on occasion from listening to myself since I too have had the not uncommon teaching experience of hearing myself say things I didn’t realize I knew or understood. I have tried to put something of what I have learned into this new book.

Another fruit of the classroom experience is my attempt here to be somewhat fuller in my explanations. My first essay was much too condensed in its matter, too telegraphic in its style. The present effort may still suffer some of those same ills because the complexity of this subject has managed to stay well ahead of my understanding of it. The reader must just be patient: I shall do better the next time.

I have also become more venturesome and extended the time frame of the story, as far as Christianity is concerned, to somewhere beyond the Reformation. A similar decisive moment does not occur in Judaism until the nineteenth century, and I have had something to say at least about Hasidism. One of Islam’s defining experiences seems to be occurring in the very immediate present, but I have done no more than touch on it.

For all that, this remains an introduction rather than a history, a guide to some of the notions and practices shared by the three monotheistic communities, notions that have also been sources of contention among them. The hard realities of politics and economics are never very far removed from this probe into issues, ideas, and institutions. Who was in charge or who possessed the power at this time or in this place is always a basic ingredient mixed into the relations, and the perceptions, of Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Sometimes these are explicit and apparent in the text; at other times they glare darkly from between the lines. But they are always there.

The intent of this work is not to make peace or to stir up war, or even ill feelings, among the three religious communities, but simply to lay out their common roots, their evolution over time, and what I see as their striking resemblances and their equally striking differences. I am not so foolish, however, as to think this is a value-free exercise. Comparisons can of course be read as invidious; certain resemblances can be parsed as reductive, or relat-ivizing, particularly among believers who are characterized by their conviction of their own unique destiny, as these three certainly are. But this same approach can also broaden understanding in quite remarkable ways. It is a little like experiencing one’s own personality in one’s offspring, where traits may appear far less endearing and charming than we imagine them in ourselves. It is one of the more salutary effects of forcing these three particular siblings to pose, however briefly, for a family portrait.

A caution for the reader: As everyone since Thales has discovered, it is considerably easier to talk about complex phenomena if we essentialize or reify them into a single, and relatively simple, thing. It is difficult to imagine more complex phenomena than the three things here called—not for the first time, of course—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. We know but sometimes forget that there really are no such things. There are only Jews, Christians, and Muslims, billions of them, whose common marks we try to make sense of here. They have collected themselves in communities and answer to those names, and a book like this is an attempt to answer why. It is assuredly easier to get and compare the answers if we attend to what is called the high tradition, the thoughtful literary works of educated Jews, Christians, and Muslims who, like us, are looking for the forests, instead of scrutinizing the scattered records carved on the individual trees. The latter records are assuredly there, thin in some times and places, thick in others, telling which Jews were mixing their milk with their mutton and which not, how many Christians were sleeping in on Sunday mornings, and why this Muslim woman wore a veil and that one chose not to. The argument can be made that this is really what those three religions are all about, and not what Mai-monides or Augustine or Ibn Khaldun thought they were. Perhaps, but these forests, for all their subversive nonexistence, are not yet so clearly charted that we can all fall to counting trees. Hence, this essentialist guide to three very thickly wooded, and essential, patches of the human experience.

Each of these volumes has been indexed separately in the hope of saving the reader some thumb-wrenching acrobatics, and there are abundant cross-references to carry one back and forth between the two. Finally, some paragraphs of these volumes, notably those having to do with Islam, have appeared in somewhat different form, and in a quite different context, in my work Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians (Princeton, 2003).

In my earlier work I gave abundant thanks to my academic colleagues for their help and inspiration. The gratitude is still academic, but this time it is for all the winning young men and women who have paid quite extraordinary sums of money to sit on the other side of the desk and listen, after a fashion, to what I have had to say. They may not have always understood what the gentleman leaning on the podium and rattling on about Rambam and plenary indulgences was exactly up to, but they listened, most of them, and they talked back on occasion, some of them, though always in good humor. They likely taught me a great deal more than I taught them, and I take this occasion to thank them all for giving me a couple precious months of their lives.

Introduction

FROM WHAT WE READ in the recorded history of his devotees, the god who created the universe had shown some earlier, generally benevolent interest in what he had brought into being. Then, at a given moment in historical time, he addressed himself to one Abram, the sheikh of an extended family of Near Eastern sheep nomads who were camping in what is today called the Negev. Worship me, the god said, and I will make you and yours a great people. It was not a unique or a solitary voice: we know from plentiful evidence that there were other, many other, gods on that landscape and in the minds of Abram’s contemporaries. Abram, however, limited his worship to this one deity, and the god in turn granted his favor to Abram, or Abraham, as he was henceforward called.

The story continues—in the Bible and in the countless books that derive from it—with an account of how Abraham’s descendants, the Sons of Israel, were drawn into Egypt, where there were gods in great abundance, figured in almost every form of human and beast. The Israelites eventually escaped under divine guidance and the shrewd and courageous leadership of Moses. On their long trek across Sinai, their god, who revealed that his name was Yahweh, unfolded his will to Moses and the Israelites. From atop a mountain in Sinai, he unmistakably asserted what was already perhaps implicit in the dialogue with Abraham: I am your Lord; you will worship no other but me.

This was an assertion of divine primacy; the god was primus inter impares, though in this instance Yahweh did not explain in what his primacy consisted, whether the other deities were his offspring, his consorts, his messengers, or perhaps just too minor to matter. He simply ignored them, though his worshipers assuredly did not on occasion. What was truly revolutionary in the covenant offered to Abraham, and then in more detail to Moses, was its exclusivity clause. The tribe of Israel was to worship no other god, to pay no dues, to give no respect, honor, or even acknowledgment to the deities of other peoples. This appears to us, who define monotheism as the denial of belief in any god save one, as at best henotheism, the recognition of a primary god above all others. But it is in practice, true monotheism. Where it really counted, in sacrifice and invocation, the Israelites were required to behave as if there were only one god. It would take centuries for that radical liturgical disregard of the other gods to be fully conceptualized into a denial of their very existence, a process immeasurably aided by the fact that this god, astonishingly, had no image or effigy. Boldly, Yahweh could only be imagined.

Yahweh would have it no other way. He was, in his own words, a jealous god whose very first commandment to Moses on Sinai had to do with his own exclusive rights to the gifts and rituals that were the dues of a god. Jealous and phobic: in the biblical account that sets the tone and terms for all who subsequently worshiped him, Yahweh demanded that all forms of impurity be kept at a very safe distance from him, away from his throne and his house, away from his city, away from his land. We are puzzled by the exact nature of this terrifying impurity that runs broadly and somewhat erratically through Yahweh’s own creation, which he had earlier praised as good. But the abomination of abominations, the Mother of all Impurities, was an altar set up to one of those other gods in Yahweh’s own Jerusalem sanctuary. Finally, and with extraordinary consequence, what was abominable to Yahweh was also to be abominable to the Israelites, who thus became morally identified with their god.

These are the beginnings of monotheism, a way of acting toward, thinking about, and, eventually, of believing in this deity known as (but not readily called) Yahweh by the Israelites, as God the Father by others, and as Allah by still others. Whatever the name, he is the same God worshiped by Jews, Christians, and Muslims as the creator and sustainer of the universe, the supreme and unique Deity from whom all proceeds and in whom all ends. Why there are three distinct communities of his believers and how and why they worship and think about him (and one another) as they do is the subject of the following pages.

The three communities have had a long, complex, and profoundly imbricated history, and I have here divided it, to grant some intermission, into two volumes. The first, The Peoples of God, describes how the three communities came about, evolved, identified and organized themselves. The first volume has a great deal to do with externals of community formation, whereas the second, The Words and Will of God, is given over to what might be called the internal or spiritual life of the monotheists, the working out of God’s will in the lives, hearts, and minds of his believers. Running through both volumes is the enormously interesting and increasingly vital question of how Jews, Christians, and Muslims have dealt with one another. In another book I used the metaphor of the family to describe that relationship—these are the Children of Abraham—and the figure is still useful in understanding them, as I attempt to spell out in the end thoughts of each volume.

Before we begin, some simple cautionary remarks may be in order. Whatever may be thought of it, Christianity is by now common intellectual and spiritual coin in the West, and Judaism only somewhat less so. But for many Western readers, Islam and Muslims are still exotic or even somewhat baffling terms and concepts. The notions surrounding Islam will be unfolded in detail in the pages that follow, but a few sentences on the terms themselves will help at the very outset. Islam is an Arabic term that broadly means submission, in this context, submission to God; thus, a Muslim, a derivative from the same root, is someone who has submitted. Though Islam and Muslim—as well as Quran—are all Arabic in origin, not all Muslims are Arabs by a long shot, and a great many Turks, Iranians, and Afghans, and millions and millions of Pakistanis, Indians, and Indonesians are properly upset when they are thought to be Arabs because they are Muslims. If all Muslims are not Arabs, neither are all Arabs Muslims. Many Palestinian Arabs are Christians, for example, and so too are very many Lebanese Arabs. Christians too can be of any ethnicity, and how the Jews identify themselves will emerge as we go along.

The reader will already perhaps have noted a discrepancy between an anticipated Moslem and the somewhat less familiar spelling of Muslim. There is much of the same ahead. The more common Englished Koran will appear in these pages as Quran, and even though I have used only one of them, there are almost as many English versions of Muhammad in circulation as there are of Hanukkah. The reason is that both Arabic and Hebrew use their own, non-Latin scripts, and they do not normally insert vowels in writing their words. Thus, when these words are transcribed into a Latin script that must represent both the consonants and English vowel sounds, some transcriptions reflect what is written and others what is heard. In any event, I have tried to be both consistent and helpful rather than baffling or just downright quirky. But, as the Muslims say, God knows best.

To pass from simple orthography onto the more slippery terrain of the theology of names, which the monotheists take extremely seriously, as already noted, the name of our subject deity will here be referred to throughout simply as God—with apologies to those who prefer an even more reverential but somewhat distracting G-d. And no effort will be made to conceal God’s unmistakable—to his earliest devotees—masculine gender, even after worshipers came to believe he had no body at all.

As some will doubtless note, the punctilious rubric is understood or is believed, or the less polite and more pointed says you, will be omitted throughout—though the reader may supply it as liberally as is thought necessary. The descriptive and argumentative statements in the text will be presented, unless otherwise noted, as they are accepted and understood by the monotheist community in question.

The present work is more about faith than about history, more about the faith communities than about the various tribes of historians who have studied them. At stake here is not what really happened, even if that were possible to ascertain, but rather what Jews, Christians, and Muslims believe happened. I do not forswear analysis; indeed, there is a good deal of it here. But it will be used principally to elicit the similarities and differences among the three faiths and so render their comparison intelligible, not, in the manner of the critical historian, to weigh and verify or discard. Some things are ignored here from economy or perhaps simple inadvertence; nothing is discarded. The contents of every page of this book, like every line of the Scriptures and traditions on which they are based, have been the subject of intense critical scrutiny and equally intense argument among historians who are believers, nonbelievers who are historians, and generations of believers caught between the two.

Finally, in everything that follows, Bible always means the Hebrew or Jewish Bible. Although the Christians certainly reckon their own Scriptures as part of the Bible, these will always be called here the New Testament or the Gospels. Old Testament, which is an argument rather than just a name, will be reserved for the quite different version of the Jewish Scriptures preferred and used by the Christians.

Note: It is my unhappy but inevitable duty to say something about calendars since they have been the source of both mischief and misunderstanding. Jews, Christians, and Muslims reckon time in different ways, so here all years will be recorded as B.C.E. (before the common era) and C.E. (common era). A distinction must be made between where people begin counting time and how they count it. The Jews begin with Creation, which they put at 3760 B.C.E., and count straight onward without a break. Thus, our portentous year 2000 fell quite innocuously across the years 5760–5761 in the Hebrew calendar. Christians too begin with Creation, except their traditional date for that event is 4004 B.C.E. They count downward from there to the end of 1 B.C., when they reverse at this watershed year of Christ’s birth (A.D., anno Domini), which marks the beginning of the Christian era. Thenceforward they begin numbering upward toward the end of the world, the day or the hour of which no one knows. For Muslims, the years from Creation to the Hegira, Muhammad’s migration from Mecca to Medina, in 622 C.E. are simply lumped together as the era of ignorance (al-jahiliyya). In 622 begins the Muslim era proper, generally designated by A.H., anno Hegirae, year of the Hegira.

How the three

communities count is another matter. Jews and Muslims use lunar calendars made up of 12 months of 29days for a total of 354 days. This puts the lunar year 11 days behind the solar cycle of our (continued) calendar. Jews address the discrepancy (and thus keep their festivals in step with the seasons) by intercalation, the practice of adding an extra month seven times in every cycle of 19 years and adding a single day at other shorter intervals. The Quran (9:36–37) strictly forbade Muslims to intercalate (as they had in pre-Islamic days), and so their lunar year falls 11 days behind the solar cycle each year. By their reckoning, the solar year 2000 C.E. spanned the lunar years 1421–1422 A.H. Christians follow the solar calendar commonly used in the West.

1

The Covenant: From Israelite to Jew

A Prologue on Earth

The Bible starts not with the Covenant but with Creation, the absolute beginning of time. It is a complex account that fills the first chapter of the Bible’s first book, appositely called Genesis, and spills over into the succeeding chapter, where the narrative picks up and follows the story of the first man and woman, Adam and Eve. The Christians read the same Bible, of course, though they called it the Old Testament, and they often interpret it quite differently from the Jews who wrote it. But the third set of monotheists, the Muslims, have their own separate version of those primordial events in a complementary Scripture called the Quran, which they likewise venerate as the Word of God. The Quran’s account of Creation, although similar to that of the Bible in intent and some detail—both insist on an omnipotent creation from nothing, for example, and on the Creator’s fashioning of humankind—is not laid out in the linear narrative fashion of Genesis (or of the Bible as a whole). The Quran is the collection of revelations given by God to Muhammad over the last twenty-two years of his life. They are divided into 114 suras or chapters, but some of the suras almost certainly contain more than one revelation. The Muslims’ Scripture, then, is a collection of occasional revelations rather than a single narrative or story, and so the events of God’s creation are introduced in the Quran at various appropriate points—appropriate to God’s purpose of warning and instructing—rather than at the outset on the linear model of Genesis. Where Creation events are cited in the Quran, they are generally in résumé form and presented as moral examples, to underline God’s power, for instance, or his goodness.

The Quran’s Account of Early Humanity

Adam and Eve—Eve, Hawwa in Arabic, is never mentioned by name in the Quran (cf. 2:35)—are also given a somewhat different treatment in the Muslim Scripture. The Bible tells a deftly crafted story of the first couple’s temptation, fall, and banishment from Eden (Gen. 2:15–24), a tale from which Christian theologians like Augustine later fashioned the powerful doctrine of Original Sin (see II/5). The Quran is well aware of that back story (2:35–39; 7:19–25), though no mention is made of Eve’s role in the fall. Rather, the villain of the tale is Iblis (Gk. diabolos), the angel who refused to bow down before Adam at God’s command and was banished from heaven with whomever of the angels chose to follow him (2:34; 7:11–18). Then, as Shaytan (Gk. satanas Heb. satan), he seduces both Adam and Eve to eat the fruit of the forbidden tree (2:36; 7:20).

Among the other pre-Abraham patriarchs in Genesis, the Quran takes some note of the briefly mentioned Enoch (Gen. 5:23–24), who, after a lifetime of 365 years, having walked with God was seen no more because God had taken him away—that is, if the prophet Idris of Quran 21:85 is to be identified with him, as is commonly done. But this is small note indeed when compared to the veritable library of works attributed to the gone but assuredly not forgotten Enoch by the Jews of late Second Temple times and the early Christians who grew up in their midst. Of far greater interest to the Quran is Noah (Gen. 6:9–9:27), who is mentioned often in the Muslims’ Book; indeed, all of Quran 71 is devoted to him. An account of the Flood is given in more than one place, and the main, and nonbiblical, thrust of the story is clear from the theme’s lengthy treatment in Quran 11:25–48. Noah was, like Muhammad, a messenger (rasul), sent to a people who rejected him and who were consequently punished with the Flood. Noah was one of the prophets from whom God took his covenant (Quran 33:7), yet the Bible’s description of its terms (Gen. 9:8–17) and the other dietary and criminal laws laid down for Noah and his descendants (9:1–7) are nowhere mentioned in the Quran. The matter of Genesis, then, is familiar terrain to both Jews (with the Christians reading over their shoulder) and Muslims. How not, thought the Muslims, since the same God had revealed his truth to all three Peoples of the Book, his Book.

History Begins

The history proper of the three great monotheistic communities begins late in chapter 11 of Genesis. There we are introduced to Abram, as he is then named, whom God summons to a special relationship with himself. A promise is made, a promise repeated numerous times under differing circumstances in the subsequent chapters of Genesis. Abram is first bidden to leave Haran—he had already emigrated from his native Iraq (Ur of the Chaldees)—to a place that God would indicate. The place is Canaan, and Abram passes through several of its holy places—holy even before Abram’s arrival—like Shechem, Bethel, and later Hebron. Interwoven with these movements are two divine promises: I will make you a great nation (12:2) and I give this land to your descendants (12:7). Just before Abram’s arrival at Hebron, the promise is expanded:

Raise your eyes and look into the distance from the place where you are, north and south, east and west. All the land you can see I will give to you and your descendants for ever. I will make your descendants as countless as the dust of the earth; if anyone could count the dust upon the ground, then he could count your descendants. Now go through the length and breadth of the land, for I give it to you. (13:14–17)

There follows (14:18–20) the curious incident of Melchizedek, whose name may be a title (My king (is) Zadek/Justice) and who is described here as king of Salem and a priest of God Most High. He pronounces a blessing on Abram and in turn is given a tithed share of Abram’s war booty. The historical and textual significance of the brief passage is complex, but what concerns us here is its religious development. Melchizedek reappears in Psalm 110:4 where the Davidic king of Jerusalem (as the Salem of Genesis was later sometimes understood) is declared to be a priest forever in the succession of Melchizedek. His appearance in this context may have been intended as a bolster to David’s monarchy, but its long-term effect was to introduce Melchizedek into the messianic complexes of late Second Temple Judaism. Christians read the Bible differently, as will be seen. Melchizedek was taken up, in any event, by the Christian author of The Letter to the Hebrews, where Psalm 110 is invoked to illustrate the transfer of the Jewish priesthood from the succession of Aaron to that of Melchizedek, who, it is said, owed his priesthood not to a system of earth-bound rules but to the power of a life that cannot be destroyed (Heb. 7:16). Thus the high priesthood of Jesus and, subsequently, the Christian sacerdotal system were grounded and validated in the appearance of the mysterious Melchizedek in the fourteenth chapter of Genesis.

Faith and Act

Like the authors of the Bible, monotheists past and present see Abraham—as he finally came to be called—from the perspective of his worship of their god, who was, of course, the Only God. But if we regard Abraham in his own context, though obviously through the focusing (or distorting) lens of the biblical account, we can see that he is actually first identified as someone who worshiped this god rather than that, a choice the Quran’s complementary narrative of the same events makes particularly clear, and, more importantly, worshiped only this god. We must think that at least some of Abraham’s ancestors or relatives had worshiped this god too—Yahweh, to give him his later self-identification—but what made Abraham notable was his exclusive worship of Yahweh. This was the reason Yahweh chose to reward him with the Covenant.

Was it, however, Abraham’s worship of Yahweh or his belief in this deity that rendered him pleasing to God? His faith or his acts? Paul answered this question for his fellow Jews in the first century, and Martin Luther posed it afresh to his church in the sixteenth. It was belief, Luther responded with Paul: Abraham’s faith had made him righteous in God’s eyes (see II/5). Luther’s answer has generally prevailed in the Christian tradition, which thinks of religion chiefly in terms of faith. The ancients, however, had a somewhat different view. While religion certainly included what we would call interior states, like fear of God’s justice or trust in his mercy, it was more often judged in terms of practice, more specifically, of ritual practice or worship. It was never a question of Abraham’s believing in Yahweh, as in Do you believe in God?—there were very few atheists in the ancient or, indeed, the premodern world—so much as his putting trust in Yahweh and showing it by performing acts of worship, like sacrifice, to acknowledge that trust, or, to use a later Muslim term, that submission (islam).

When the promise was first made to him, the man still known as Abram was past seventy-five years of age and had no children; indeed, when God later appears to him in a vision (Gen. 15:1), Abram points out that his sole heir is a certain Eliezer of Damascus, possibly an adopted slave. God assures him that there will be an heir of his own line, a child of your own body, and once again there is a promise to the still nomadic Abram and his descendants of a land, here defined in enlarged fashion to embrace all the territory from the River of Egypt to the Great River, the river Euphrates (15:18).

A Holy Land

This last literary tracing of the Promised Land represents, in what was even then a rhetorical exaggeration, the extent of the kingdom later ruled over by Solomon (so 1 Kings 4:21), a matter of interest to the biblical historian perhaps, but not for the Jewish believer who read it as one definition of the land owned by God—and thus sanctified—and now shared with his favored people. This holy land, Eretz Israel, as it will later be called, eventually came into the possession of Abraham’s descendants—these events are chiefly described in the Book of Joshua—and then the consequences of dwelling in that land first fell into place. Many of the regulations, those governing agricultural tithes, for example, which were later given to Moses in the Torah (see II/4) could—and can—be fulfilled only within the boundaries of the Land of Israel. Thus the boundaries of that land had to be accurately drawn for purposes of precise observance of the Law. We do not know how early that task began, but it was certainly taken seriously in early rabbinic times.

The connection of the Land and the Law had as its obvious corollary the notion that perfect observance was possible only within the Land of Israel, whence flowed the obligation of return (aliya, literally, going up) to that Holy Land. The obligation to return to the Promised Land increasingly informed Jewish sensibilities as the number of Jews living abroad in the so-called Diaspora (see below) grew over the centuries. This amalgam of spiritual nostalgia and desire for strict observance of the Law constituted a kind of spiritual Zionism—Zion is one of the names of the temple mount in Jerusalem—which most Jews in most places embraced over the centuries, and led eventually to its modern, more nationalistic counterpart, political Zionism (see I/6).

Both Christians and Muslims view the same land as holy, though for quite different reasons. Very early on Christians had begun to disassociate themselves not only from the main body of Jews but also from the Jewish Holy Land in general and their Holy City, Jerusalem, in particular. The Muslims, who see no visions of a heavenly Jerusalem, have no particular religious claims on that land, though they do on certain of its holy places, and, what is quite a different matter, some Arabs of the region obviously have a political claim on Palestine. Neither Christianity nor Islam fosters the notion of a return to their Palestinian holy land, however—not, at least, in the sense of a migration. What was generated instead was, first, a powerful desire to visit the places esteemed holy in that land—the practice we call pilgrimage—and second, the more overtly political wish to control those same places. In Western Christendom this impulse led in the eleventh century to the first of the Christian holy wars against Islam, the Crusades (see I/8), and in Islam, to a powerful Counter-Crusade under the famous hero Salah al-Din (Saladin), who in 1187 retook Jerusalem and Palestine from the Frankish Christian crusaders. Both these events have colored European thinking about Palestine and Muslim thinking about Christian Europe’s designs on it down to modern times, and from the late nineteenth century the Jewish political movement called Zionism has both used and resisted those impulses.

Hagar and Ishmael

It is his wife Sarai who in the opening verses of Genesis 16 suggests to Abram that perhaps he can and should father a son with her Egyptian slave-girl, Hagar. So indeed he does. There is quickly, and perhaps inevitably, a falling-out between the two women. Hagar flees and returns only after a divine apparition promises that her son will have many descendants, though he himself will ever be an outcast. At his birth this first son is called Ishmael; Abram is by then eighty-six years old (16:10–16). Some thirteen years later, the Lord appears once more to Abram. He repeats the promise of numerous heirs and a land to possess, but now the promise is connected with a reciprocal act on Abram’s part: as a sign of the covenant, he must circumcise all the males of his household, kin and foreigner alike, the newborn on the eighth day. It is on this occasion too that, in an act symbolizing the transformation of their state—it happens often in these three communities—Abram’s name is changed to Abraham and Sarai’s to Sarah. Abraham is puzzled, however. He and his wife are far beyond parenthood; perhaps it is Ishmael, after all, who will inherit the promise. No, the Lord insists, Ishmael will be the father of a great nation, but it is the son of Abraham and Sarah who will inherit. Abraham has himself, Ishmael, and the other males of his household, kin and slaves, circumcised without further comment (Gen. 17).

The promise will be offered once again by God before it is finally fulfilled in Isaac’s birth. It next arises during a mysterious visit of three men to Abraham’s camp at Mamre by Hebron. Abraham responds with a hospitality that makes him into the Bible’s paradigm of generosity, the friend of God, as he will be known to Jews, Christians, and Muslims. One of the strangers, who becomes, in the midst of the following exchange, the Lord, assures Sarah she will have a child; she laughs (18:1–15). There follow the extended incidents of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, and not until the beginning of Genesis 21 is Isaac, the heir to the Covenant, born to Sarah. Sarah and Hagar are still at odds, however, and it is at Sarah’s insistence that Hagar and her son Ishmael are driven out of Abraham’s camp near Beersheba to wander in the desert, where the child would surely have died had not God heard Hagar’s prayer and caused the miraculous appearance of a well. God was with the child, the account concludes, and he grew up and lived in the wilderness of Pharan (21:20–21).

This is almost the last we hear of Ishmael in the Bible. Ishmael himself marries an Egyptian wife (21:20–21), and one of his daughters marries Esau (25:13–15), from whom the Edomites—later the Idumeans—of the Negev are descended. In Genesis 25:9 Ishmael is somewhat unaccountably present with Isaac to bury Abraham at Hebron, and there is a list of his sons in Genesis 25:12–18. They dwell somewhere to the east of the Israelites.

Ishmaelites and Arabs

Although at his death, at age 137 (Gen. 25:17), Ishmael disappears from the Bible, he remained in the consciousness of the Jews. We cannot follow the full gestation of the story, but we can read its denouement. The source of Genesis may have thought the Edomites of the Negev, one of Israel’s inveterate enemies, were the nation descended from Ishmael, but a later generation of Jews thought otherwise. The second-century B.C.E. Book of Jubilees, which is largely a retelling of Genesis from a slightly different perspective, informs us that Abraham before his death summoned all his sons and grandchildren, including Ishmael and his twelve offspring, and bade them to continue to observe circumcision, to avoid ritual uncleanness and marriage with the Canaanites. Then, at the end of the same passage, a crucial identification is made, though almost certainly not for the first time. The sons of Ishmael, and their cousins, the offspring of Abraham and another wife, Keturah, with whom they intermarried, did indeed become a great nation, as God had promised: they were the Arabs. Abraham sends Ishmael and his offspring to settle between Pharan and the borders of Babylon, in all the land to the East, facing the desert. And these mingled with each other, and they were called Arabs and Ishmaelites (20:11–13).

Both the name and the identification stuck, first among the Jews—the historian Josephus discusses this at length in speaking of the Nabateans, Israel’s Arab neighbors east of the Jordan (Antiquities 1.12.2–4)—and then among the Christians of the Middle East. For these latter, the Arabs were either Ish-maelites or Saracens. The latter word is of unknown origin, but the Middle Eastern Christians of the pre-Islamic era parsed it in biblical terms: Saracen came from Sarah and the Greek kene, empty or void, thus Sara-is-barren. When Sozomen wrote his Church History in 440 C.E., he pointed to the obvious similarities between Arab and Jewish customs, like circumcision and refraining from pork. True, the Ishmaelite Arabs had been corrupted by their long association with the pagans who surrounded them, but, adds Sozomen, many still live in the Jewish fashion.

None of this had anything to do with Islam. The identification of the Arabs as Ishmaelites was strictly ethnic—everyone knew the Arabs were polytheists—based on a similarity of customs. One not, apparently, aware of the identification was Muhammad. Ishmael appears several times in the Quran, first as a somewhat indistinct Hebrew prophet, and then, in later chapters, as Abraham’s son. Quite remarkably, he and Abraham are said to have built the Kaaba, the sacred shrine building that stood in Muhammad’s day—as it does today—in the midst of Mecca (2:125–127). The Quran offers no explanation for this extraordinary information, and so we can only assume that it was known and accepted as true not only by Muhammad but, even more astonishingly, by his listeners.

Muhammad strongly emphasized that the Islam being promulgated in the Quran was nothing other than the religion of Abraham (see I/3) and that the earlier activity of Abraham—and Ishmael—in Mecca was crucial to this enterprise. But nowhere is it suggested or even hinted that Muhammad was aware that Ishmael was widely recognized elsewhere as the Arabs’ ancestor. Nor is it ever asserted that Islam’s claim to be the new version of the true faith was based on