The Quran contains references to more than fifty people and events also found in the Bible. While the stories told in each book are generally comparable, there are also some notable differences.
Often, stories related in the Quran tend to concentrate on the moral or spiritual significance of events rather than the details.[1] Biblical stories come from diverse sources and authors, so their attention to detail varies individually.
The Islamic methodology of (Arabic: تفسير القرآن بالكتاب) refers to interpreting the Qur'an with/through the Bible.[2] This approach adopts canonical Arabic versions of the Bible, including the Tawrat (Torah) and the Injil (Gospel), both to illuminate and to add exegetical depth to the reading of the Qur'an. Notable Muslim (commentators) of the Bible and Qur'an who weaved biblical texts together with Qur'anic ones include Abu al-Hakam Abd al-Salam bin al-Isbili of Al-Andalus and Ibrahim bin Umar bin Hasan al-Biqa'i.
See main article: Adam, Eve, Adam and Eve, Adam in Islam and Adam in rabbinic literature. The Quran usually mentions God creating Adam from "earth" or "clay" (although one verse suggests "dust" or "dirt"). [3] God is said to breathe his spirit into Adam as in the Genesis creation narrative, and also to have created him simply by saying "Be". The Quran then depicts the angels as doubting the creation of Adam, a detail not found in the Genesis accounts:
When your Lord said to the angels, "I am indeed going to set a viceroy on the earth," they said, "Will You set in it someone who will cause corruption in it and shed blood, while we celebrate Your praise and proclaim Your sanctity?" He said, "Indeed, I know what you do not know."
While not found in Genesis, the Quranic account is linked to a Jewish exegesis of Psalm 8,[4] which wonders why God cares for human beings despite their cosmic insignificance. Some Jewish interpreters have understood the question as one being asked by the angels when God created Adam. This led to a tradition in the Babylonian Talmud in which the angels object to the evils that humans will commit in the future, which may be the source of the Quranic narrative.
The Quranic narrative continues that God "taught Adam the Names, all of them," and that Adam presented the names to the angels, whereas Genesis has Adam himself naming the animals. The difference highlights the Quranic emphasis on both God's absolute knowledge, and the superiority of humanity to the angels implied earlier.
God then commands the angels to bow down to Adam, but Iblis refuses, saying that he is better than Adam because he was created from fire and Adam from clay. The submission of the angels to Adam is another detail not mentioned in Genesis but important in Syriac Christian texts such as the Cave of Treasures, where it reflects a Christian notion of Adam as being a primordial analogue of Jesus. In the Cave of Treasures, Satan refuses God's order to bow before Adam "since I am fire and spirit, not that I worship something that is made of dirt", using almost the same words as in the Quran.
The creation of Eve is not specified in the Quran, but several verses imply the traditional Genesis account by stating that God "created you [humanity] from a single soul, and created its mate from it".
In the Quran, God then tells Adam and his unnamed wife to live in paradise but not to approach a certain tree, which Satan calls the "tree of immortality", whereas Genesis refers to two trees, a tree of the knowledge of good and evil which Adam and Eve must not eat from, and another tree of life. This appears to reflect Syrian Christian exegesis, in which the two trees were considered identical.
In the Quran it is Satan himself tricking Adam and Eve into approaching the tree, a progression of the Christian notion in which the Serpent becomes an incarnation of Satan, a link not traditionally made in Judaism.
In contrast to Christianity, Satan promises immortality or to "become like angel" by approaching the tree. The reference to "angels" might be an interpretation of the Biblical ʾĔlōhīm. Whereas ʾĔlōhīm are considered a reference to God in the Christian tradition, Islam adopted this term as a reference to angels.[5]
When they are tempted by Satan, "their nakedness [becomes] apparent to them." All three are then expelled from Paradise. There is no mention in the Quran of Eve tempting Adam. While Genesis states that Adam and Eve "realized"[6] that they were naked, the Quran is more ambiguous, referring to Satan's desire to "expose to them what was hidden from them of their nakedness". This may reflect Syriac Christian traditions in which Adam and Eve were thought to be clothed with "glory" before eating from the tree, at which point they became naked instead of merely realizing their prior nakedness.
According to the Quranic narrative, Adam is then forgiven by God after "receiving certain words from his Lord". While this is another detail not explicitly mentioned in Genesis, the Quranic episode again has a parallel in the Cave of Treasures, in which God comforts Adam and says that he has "preserved him from the curse" of the land, and from the pre-Islamic apocrypha Life of Adam and Eve, in which God promises Adam that he will eventually return to paradise.
See main article: Cain and Abel and Cain and Abel in Islam.
In the Bible, Adam and Eve have two sons: the elder Cain, who is a farmer, and the younger Abel, a shepherd. When both make sacrifices to God, God only accepts Abel's offerings. Angered, Cain kills his brother despite God's warning. He is condemned to a lifetime of wandering and fruitless toil.[7] The Qur'an narrates a similar story relating to the sons of Adam, although the brothers are not named.
However, a significant difference between the two versions is that while God speaks to Cain in the Bible, the brother who is accepted by God speaks to the rejected one in the Quran, saying:
God accepts only from the God-wary. Even if you extend your hand toward me to kill me, I will not extend my hand toward you to kill you. Indeed, I fear God, the Lord of all the worlds. I desire that you earn [the burden of] my sin and your sin, to become one of the inmates of the Fire, and such is the requital of the wrongdoers.29.
A conversation between Cain and Abel is attested in one Syriac source, although this version differs significantly from the Quran in that Abel begs his brother not to kill him. A conversation between the brothers before the murder is also found in the Targum Neofiti, an Aramaic-language Jewish annotation of the Torah.
The rejected brother then kills the younger brother, as Cain does to Abel. In the Quran, God then sends a crow to dig the earth in which to bury the murdered brother, and the murderer regrets his deed as he looks upon the crow. While a bird digging the earth for Abel is a motif that appears in certain late extra-biblical Christian and Jewish sources, such as the Tanhuma, the Quran is the earliest known version of the episode and may be the source of the other attestations.
The Quran then draws a lesson from the murder, not found in the text of the Torah:
That is why We decreed for the Children of Israel that whoever kills a soul, without [its being guilty of] manslaughter or corruption on the earth, is as though he had killed all mankind, and whoever saves a life is as though he had saved all mankind.
This verse is nearly identical to a passage in the Mishnah Sanhedrin tractate, part of the Jewish Oral Torah, which also concludes that the lesson of the murder of Abel is that "whosoever destroys a single soul is regarded as though he destroyed a complete world, and whosoever saves a single soul is regarded as though he saved a complete world".
See main article: Noah in Islam, Noah and Noah in rabbinic literature. In both the Bible and the Quran, Noah is described as a righteous man who lived among a sinful people who God destroyed with a flood while saving Noah, his family, and the animals by commanding him to build an Ark and store the animals in them. In both sacred books, he is said to have lived for 950 years. But unlike in Genesis, which records not a single word from Noah before he leaves the Ark, the Quranic story of the prophet focuses less on the details of the flood and more on Noah's unsuccessful attempts to warn his people, directly quoting his attempts to persuade his wicked countrymen to turn to righteousness. This emphasis on Noah as a preacher vainly attempting to save others, while not found in the Torah itself, appears in Christian sources as early as the Second Epistle of Peter and was present in Jewish and Christian sources of Late Antiquity, including the Talmud. In the context of the Quran, it emphasizes the crucial notion that Noah and other biblical figures were prototypes of the Islamic prophet Muhammad, all preaching righteousness to save their people from doom.
The Bible and the Quran also diverge on the fate of Noah's family. In the Bible, all of Noah's immediate family is saved, including his three sons. But the Quran mentions a son of Noah who rejects the Ark, instead choosing to take refuge on a mountain where he is drowned. Noah asks God to save his son, but God refuses. This buttresses the recurrent Quranic emphasis on the importance of faith and righteous conduct over ties of family. The episode may also be connected to a passage in the Book of Ezekiel, which similarly stresses righteousness over blood ties by stating that "even if Noah and Daniel and Job were living there [in a sinful country]... they would be able to save neither son nor daughter, only themselves by their uprightness".[8] But while the son of Noah who would not be saved is only hypothetical in Ezekiel, he is a real son in the Quran, traditionally identified (though not by the Quran itself) with Yam. The Quran also cites Noah's wife as "an example of the faithless" who was doomed to hellfire without further elaboration, although some Islamic exegetical traditions hold that she would call Noah a madman and was subsequently drowned in the flood. No similar reference exists in the Bible, although certain Gnostic legends entailed a hostile portrayal of Noah's wife. The Bible also records Noah being drunk on wine, and fell asleep naked, and after being found naked by his son Ham, he cursed Canaan, Ham's son.[9] The Quranic narrative does not mention such an incident, so Muslims reject this biblical narrative.
In the Quran, the Ark is said to rest on the hills of Mount Judi (Hud nosup. no.); in the Bible, it is said to rest on the mountains of Ararat (Gen. 8:4) The Al-Djoudi (Judi) is apparently a mountain in the biblical mountain range of Ararat. The Quran cites a particular mount in the Ararat Range, whereas the Bible just mentions the Ararat Range by name. There is a Mount Al-Djoudi in the present-day Ararat mountain range in Turkey.
See main article: Abraham in Islam and Abraham.
See main article: Isaac in Islam. See Genesis 18:1–15, 22:1–20 and,[10],[11],[12] and .[13] Several messengers come to Abraham on their way to destroy the people of Sodom and Gomorrah. Abraham welcomes them into his tent and provides them with food. They then promise their host that Isaac (ʾIsḥāq إسحٰق) will soon be born to Abraham's wife, Sarah (Sārah سارة). Sarah laughs at the idea because she is far too old to bear children. The Hebrew name יצחק means 'he laughs" and is one of the literary tropes in the biblical story. This is also reflected in the Qur'anic version.
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