Source of the Koran

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From the Creation to the Last Judgment he uses Jewish ideas. Allah is Yahweh; Allah is a contraction of al-Ilah, an old Kaaba god; a kindred word was used in various forms in divers Semitic languages to express divinity; so the Jews used Elohim, and Christ on the cross appealed to Eli. Both Allah and Yahweh are gods of compassion, but they are also stern and warlike deities, capable of many human passions, and resolved to have no other god besides them. The Shema’ Yisrael of the Jewish ritual, affirming the unity of God, is repeated in the first article of Moslem belief—”There is no god but Allah.” The Koranic refrain that Allah is “gracious and compassionate” echoes the same frequent phrase in the Talmud.’

 

The designation of Allah as Rahrnan, the merciful, recalls the rabbinical use of Rahmana for Yahweh in the Talmudic age.32 The Talmud loves to say, “The Holy One, Blessed be He”; Moslem literature follows with the oft-repeated words, “Allah” (or “Mohammed”), “Blessed be lie.” Apparently the Jews who acquainted the Prophet with the Bible also gave him snatches of the Talmud; a hundred passages in the Koran echo the Mishna and the Gemaras.33 The teachings of the Koran about angels, the resurrection, and heaven follow the Talmud rather than the Old Testament. Stories that make up a fourth of the Koran can be traced to haggadic (illustrative) elements in the Talmud.34 Where the Koran narratives vary from the Biblical accounts (as in the story of Joseph) they usually accord with variations already existing in the haggadic literature of the pre-Moslem Jews.

 

From the Mishna and halakah—the oral law of the Jews—Mohammed seems to have derived many elements of ritual, even minute details of diet and hygiene. Ceremonial purification before prayer is enjoined, and the hands may be washed with sand if no water can be had—precisely the rabbinical formula. The Jewish institution of the Sabbath pleased Mohammed; he adopted it with a distinction in making Friday a day of prayer for the Moslems. The Koran, like the Mosaic Law, forbids the eating of blood, or the flesh of swine or dogs, or of any animal that has died of itself, or has been killed by another animal, or has been offered to an idol (v, ~ vi, 146); the Koran, however, allows the eating of camels flesh, which Moses forbade, but which was some- times the only flesh food available in the desert. The Moslem method of fasting followed the Hebrew model.

 

The Jews were bidden by their rabbis to pray thrice daily, facing toward Jerusalem and the Temple, and to prostrate themselves with forehead to the ground; Mohammed adapted these rules to Islam. The first chapter of the Koran, which is the basic prayer of Islam, is essentially Judaic. The lovely greeting of the Hebrew—Sholom aleichem— parallels the noble “Peace be with you” of Islam. Finally, the Talmudic heaven, like the Koranic paradise, is one of frankly physical, as well as ecstatically spiritual, delights.

 

Some of these elements in creed and practice may have been a common heritage of the Semites; some of them—angels, devils, Satan, heaven, hell, the resurrection, the Last Judgment—had been taken by the Jews from Babylonia or Persia, and may have gone directly from Persia to Islam. In Zoroastrian, as in Mohammedan, escharology, the resurrected dead must walk upon a perilous bridge over a deep abyss; the wicked fall into hell, the good pass into a paradise where they enjoy, among other dainties, the society of women (houris) whose beauty and ardor will last forever. To Jewish theology, ethics, and ritual, and Persian escharology, Mohammed added Arab demonology, pilgrimage, and the Kaaba ceremony, and made Islam.

 

Excerpts from Will Durant's The Age of Faith Pages

http://www.sullivan-county.com/x/durant_koran.htm