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In Search of a Sinful Pun: A Granular Analysis of Q 2:58–59
-
David Gyllenhaal
and
Shlomo Zuckier
Published/Copyright:
October 10, 2024
Abstract
This paper offers a new reading of Q 2:58–59 by way of Muqātil ibn Sulaymān’s Tafsīr and its use of the Hebrew Bible and Jewish or possibly Christian traditions. While the scholarly study of the Qurʾān in its late antique context has often been ambivalent toward medieval Arabic tafsīr, this paper uses the testimony of the tafsīr corpus on a single mysterious passage to reconstruct a plausible meaning in its original Qurʾānic milieu and shed light on the exegetical intimacies of Jews, Christians, and Muslims in the first Hijri centuries.
Q 2:58–59 contain a puzzling pericope about God punishing the Israelites because they substituted one word, which God had commanded them to say, with another. The word God commanded them to say, ḥiṭṭa, does not represent any Arabic word that makes good sense in context. The word they substituted is never specified. Later Arabic exegetes were thus puzzled by the passage and proposed many different solutions. The paper closely analyzes Muqātil ibn Sulaymān’s reading of the relevant passage in light of biblical intertexts and Jewish or Christian traditions, yielding an interpretation of this passage with reference to a perfidious pun on the words for “sin” and “grain” that works in Aramaic or possibly Hebrew, but not in Arabic.
Note
We wish to thank here a number of people who gave us helpful feedback on the paper: Michael Cook, Katharina Heyden, Sarah Islam, Paul Neuenkirchen, David Nirenberg, Marijn van Putten, Gabriel Reynolds, Jillian Stinchcomb, Benjamin Suchard, George Kiraz, and a reader for this journal. We also thank collectively all our colleagues and partners on the Coproduced Religions project, which provided the locus for our respective interests to come together in working on this project.
Published Online: 2024-10-10
Published in Print: 2024-10-09
© 2024 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
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Articles in the same Issue
- Titelseiten
- Articles
- The Ark of the Covenant’s Spelling Controversy: A Historical Linguistic Perspective
- In Search of a Sinful Pun: A Granular Analysis of Q 2:58–59
- On the Sound of Qurʾān: Nasalization (ghunna) as Ornamentation and Accentuation in Recitation
- “Superiority is due to us, and the king should come from among us”: The Arab Conquests and Conflicts of the Early Umayyad Era in a 7th-Century Syriac Universal History of Yoḥannān bar Penkāyē
- The Time of the Chancery: Normative and Discretionary Dating in 7th–8th-century Arabic Epistolography
- Rayḥāna “The Mad”: Her Persona and Poetry
- Binding and Unbinding: The Knotted Serpents on the Lining of the So-called Mantle of Roger II (528/1133–4)
- Delegation of Authority to Human Beings: A Late Safavid Theologian’s Account on the Legislative Meaning of Tafwīḍ
- The Challenges of a Purchase by the Berlin Papyrus Collection in 1926
- Reviews
- Annotated Bibliography “Arabic Papyrology: Gender, Conversions, and Book Culture”
- Cyrille Aillet, L’archipel Ibāḍīte. Une histoire des marges du Maghreb médiéval, Lyon, CIHAM Éditions, 2022 (Mondes médiévaux). 592 p. ISBN: 978-2-9568426-4-4.
- Hassan Ansari und Sabine Schmidtke, Al-Šarīf al-Murtaḍā’s Oeuvre and Thought in Context. An Archaeological Inquiry into Texts and their Transmission. Part I: Study. Part II: Illustrations. Córdoba: UCO Press, Cordoba University Press, CNERU, Córdoba Near Eastern Research Unit, – IAS, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, 2022. 852 + 806 fig., Serie Arabo-Islamica, vol. 4. ISBN 978-84-9927-702-8.
- Eleazar Birnbaum, Arabic and Persian Manuscripts in the Birnbaum Collection, Toronto: A Brief Catalogue, Islamic Manuscripts and Books, vol. 18, Leiden: Brill, 2019, 226 pp., ISBN 978-90-04-38821-5.
- Olivier Bouquet, Vie et mort d’un grand vizir: Halil Hamid Pacha (1736–1785) – Biographie de l’Empire ottoman, Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2022, 633 pp., ISBN: 978-2-251-45243-2.
- Peter Jackson, From Genghis Khan to Tamerlane. The Reawakening of Mongol Asia, New Haven/London (Yale University Press) 2023. xxiv, 720 pp, mit sechs Karten und acht genealogischen Tafeln. Hardcover ISBN 978-300-25112-8.
- Michael Muhammad Knight, Muhammad’s Body: Baraka Networks and the Prophetic Assemblage, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020, 214 pp., notes, bibl., index, ISBN: 978-1-4696-5891-9 (Paperback), 978-1-4696-5890-2 (Hardcover).
- Maryam Moazzen, The Formation of a Religious Landscape. Shiʿi Higher Learning in Safavid Iran, Leiden: Brill, 2017 (hb), xiii+290 pp., appendix, bibliography, index, ISBN: 9789004355293.
- Virginie Prevost, Les mosquées ibadites du Djebel Nafūsa. Architecture, histoire et religions du nord-ouest de la Libye (VIIIe–XIIIe siècle), Monograph 10, London: Society for Libyan Studies, 2016, 232 pp., ISBN 978 1 900971 41 6.
- Kristina Richardson, Roma in the Medieval Islamic World: Literacy, Culture, and Migration, London: I.B. Tauris, 2022, 239 + viii pages, index, illustrations; ISBN: 978-1-7845-3731-9.
- Nuryogdi Toshov, Po sledam dvortsovoi biblioteki: Rukopisnaya kul’tura v Khorezme pri Kongratakh, Wien: Austrian Academy of Sciences, 2023 (Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosophisch-historische Klasse: Sitzungsberichte, 928. Band; Veröffentlichungen zur Iranistik, herausgegeben von Christine Noelle-Karimi und Florian Schwarz, Nr. 89; Studies and Texts on Central Asia, herausgegeben von Florian Schwarz, Band 4), 352 pp., ISBN 978-3-7001-8375-4.
- Jo van Steenbergen, ed., Trajectories of State Formation across Fifteenth-Century Islamic West-Asia: Eurasian Parallels, Connections and Divergences (Rulers & Elites: Comparative Studies in Governance, 18), Leiden: Brill, 2020, xii + 361 pp. incl. index, ISBN 978-90-04-43130-0.
- Jo Van Steenbergen and Maya Termonia, eds., New Readings in Arabic Historiography from Late Medieval Egypt and Syria: Proceedings of the Themed Day of the Fifth Conference of the School of Mamluk Studies, Brill, 2021, 507 pp., ISBN: 978-90-04-45890-1, ISBN: 978-90-04-44702-8.
