1 Umberto Eco, Postscript to “The Name of the Rose” (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984) xxiv.

2 To name only a few notable contributions: Tayyar Altıkulaç, al-Muṣḥaf al-sharīf al-mansūb ilā ʿUthmān b. ʿAffān: nuskhat Matḥaf al-Ᾱthār al-Turkiyyah wa-l-Islāmiyyah bi-Istānbūl (Istanbul: Markaz al-Buḥūth al-Islāmiyyah, 2007); François Déroche, La transmission écrite du Coran dans les débuts de l’islam. Le codex Parisino-petropolitanus (Leiden: Brill, 2009); Behnam Sadeghi and Uwe Bergmann, “The Codex of a Companion of the Prophet and the Qurʾān of the Prophet,” Arabica 57 (2010) 343–436; Eléonore Cellard, Codex Amrensis 1 (Leiden: Brill, 2018); Shady H. Nasser, The Transmission of the Variant Readings of the Qurʾān: The Problem of Tawātur and the Emergence of Shawādhdh (Texts and Studies on the Qur’ān 9; Leiden: Brill, 2012); Michel Cuypers, Le festin. Une lecture de la sourate al-Mâ’ida (Paris: Lethielleux, 2007); Aisha Geissinger, Gender and Muslim Constructions of Exegetical Authority: A Rereading of the Classical Genre of Qur’ān Commentary (Islamic History and Civilization; Leiden: Brill, 2015); Walid A. Saleh, “The Gloss as Intellectual History: The Ḥāshiyahs on al-Kashshāf,” Oriens 41 (2013) 217–59; Nicolai Sinai, Fortschreibung und Auslegung. Studien zur frühen Koraninterpretation (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2009); Behnam Sadeghi, “The Chronology of the Qurʾān: A Stylometric Research Program,” Arabica 58 (2011) 210–99; Angelika Neuwirth, Der Koran als Text der Spätantike. Ein europäischer Zugang (Berlin: Verlag der Weltreligionen, 2010); Gabriel S. Reynolds, The Qurʾān and Its Biblical Subtext (London: Routledge, 2010); Holger M. Zellentin, The Qurʾān’s Legal Culture: The “Didascalia Apostolorum” as a Point of Departure (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013).

3 The inevitable inadequacy of the work’s title is captured elegantly by Paul Mankowski, who offers a humorous alternative imitating 17th-cent. conventions: “A New English Rendering of The Qur’an, being a Revision by the Author of the celebrated Translation of Ali Quli Qarai, together with a seriatim Commentary shewing the manifold narrative Tributaries ultimately derived from the Old and New Testaments of the Bible, with particular Attention to various Syriac Christian Vehicles of Transmission, enriched by the Annotations and Explanations of sundry eminent Scholars: Muslim, Jewish, and Christian alike, together with a compendious Bibliography, &c” (Paul V. Mankowski, “Historical-Critical Qur’an,” First Things [November 2018], https://www.firstthings.com/article/2018/11/historical-critical-quran). I thank my colleague Bernard Levinson for bringing this review to my attention.

4 QB, 199.

5 E.g., QB, 705, ad Q 39:67.

6 QB, 685.

7 Following Reynolds, I use “biblical traditions” and “biblical literature” in a broad sense, i.e., as including the Bible as well as para-biblical and post-biblical writings.

8 QB, 5.

9 Ibid., 6; cf. Gabriel Said Reynolds, The Qurʾān and Its Biblical Subtext (henceforth QBS; Routledge Studies in the Qur’an 10; New York: Routledge, 2010) 13.

10 QB, 4.

11 QB, 4. Cf. ibid., 6, 8. This concern with the Qur’an’s original context is reflected in the titles of two excellent volumes that Reynolds edited: The Qurʾān in Its Historical Context (Routledge Studies in the Qur’an; New York: Routledge, 2008) and New Perspectives on the Qurʾān: The Qurʾān in Its Historical Context 2 (Routledge Studies in the Qur’an 12; New York: Routledge, 2011).

12 QB, 4.

13 See, for example, QB, 4, 235, 309, 388, 438–39, 529, 847–48. Similarly, in an earlier work, Reynolds claims that “paganism is hardly evident in the Qurʾān” (QBS, 33).

14 QB, 5. Although Reynolds questions the idea that the Qur’an is “a transcript of Muḥammad’s proclamations between AD 610 and 632” (ibid.), he does not seem to accept John Wansbrough’s late dating of the Qur’an. In fact, in a 2015 article, Reynolds cites the results of radiocarbon analysis on certain Qur’an fragments to suggest that the Qur’an may be earlier than commonly imagined (“Variant Readings: The Birmingham Qur’an in the Context of Debate on Islamic Origins,” TimesLitSupp [7 August 2015] 14–15).

15 For a recent and insightful discussion of this question, see Nicolai Sinai, The Qur’an: A Historical-Critical Introduction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017) 59–77. Note that the labels and the three-fold division of approaches are mine, not Sinai’s.

16 For a recent discussion of the few Christian individuals mentioned in these sources, see Ghada Osman, “Pre-Islamic Arab Converts to Christianity in Mecca and Medina: An Investigation into the Arabic Sources,” MW 95 (January 2005) 67–80.

17 Drawing attention to the elliptical nature of the Qur’an’s retellings of biblical stories, Wansbrough concluded that “the public for whom Muslim scripture was intended could be expected to supply the missing detail” (John Wansbrough, Quranic Studies: Sources and Methods of Scriptural Interpretation [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977] xxi). See also idem, The Sectarian Milieu: Content and Composition of Islamic Salvation History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978).

18 See G. R. Hawting, The Idea of Idolatry and the Emergence of Islam: From Polemic to History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). See also Patricia Crone, “The Religion of the Qurʾānic Pagans: God and the Lesser Deities,” Arabica 57 (2010) 151–200; eadem, “Angels versus Humans as Messengers of God,” in Revelation, Literature, and Community in Late Antiquity (ed. Philippa Townsend and Moulie Vidas; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011) 315–36; eadem, “The Quranic Mushrikūn and the Resurrection (Part I),” BSOAS 75 (2012) 445–72; eadem, “The Quranic Mushrikūn and the Resurrection (Part II),” BSOAS 76 (2013) 1–20; and eadem, “Pagan Arabs as God-Fearers,” in Islam and Its Past: Jahiliyya, Late Antiquity, and the Qurʾan (ed. Carol Bakhos and Michael Cook; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017) 140–64.

19 See, e.g., Sidney H. Griffith, “Christian Lore and the Arabic Qurʾān: The ‘Companions of the Cave’ in Sūrat al-Kahf and in Syriac Christian Tradition,” in The Qur’ān in Its Historical Context (ed. Reynolds) 109–37, at 115; Reuven Firestone, “Is There a Notion of ‘Divine Election’ in the Qurʾān?,” in New Perspectives on the Qurʾān (ed. Reynolds) 393–410, at 399; and Sinai, The Qur’an, 62. For a similar position that predates Wansbrough’s Quranic Studies, see Hamilton A. R. Gibb, “Pre-Islamic Monotheism in Arabia,” HTR 55 (1962) 269–80, esp. 273, where Gibb claims that Meccans were familiar with biblical ideas but did not yet believe in them. One of the few scholars to depart from this trend is Holger Zellentin, who makes a distinction between the Qur’an’s Meccan and Medinan contexts: “the audience of the Medinan Qurʾān, in a general way, is implied to be much more scripturally astute than the Meccan audience, which may have been familiar with Biblical stories only in a rudimentary way” (“Trialogical Anthropology: The Qurʾān on Adam and Iblīs in View of Rabbinic and Christian Discourse,” in New Approaches to Human Dignity in the Context of Qurʾānic Anthropology: The Quest for Humanity [ed. R. Braun and H. Çiçek; Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017] 59–129, at 65).

20 The approach in QB is therefore similar to Reynolds’s previous work, The Qurʾān and Its Biblical Subtext, which he notes “is not based at all on a historical context, whether pagan, Jewish, or Christian” (QBS, 35).

21 There is commentary on this verse, but it discusses only the terms qurʾān and furqān (QB, 82–83).

22 “Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen” (Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, With an Introduction by Bertrand Russell [London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1922] 162).

23 My phrasing here reflects the title of Reynolds’s opinion piece, “Reading the Qur’an through the Bible,” First Things (November 2009) 17–20.

24 QBS, 1.

25 Some of these studies are referenced in Reynolds, The Qurʾān and Its Biblical Subtext, 6–9.

26 A “simultext” can refer to any other text from the Qur’an that is relevant for understanding a given passage at hand. This term has been introduced to Qur’anic Studies by Holger Zellentin, who has in turn adopted it from the study of Rabbinic literature. See Zellentin, “The Synchronic and the Diachronic Qurʾān: Sūrat Yā Sīn, Lot’s People, and the Rabbis,” in The Making of Religious Texts in Islam: The Fragment and the Whole (Pre-and Early Islam) (ed. A. Hilali and S.R. Burge; Berlin: Gerlach Press, 2019) 111–74, esp. at 113 and 163–64 n. 21.

27 See Daniel A. Madigan, “Themes and Topics,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Qurʾān (ed. Jane D. McAuliffe; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) 79–95, at 87. Shuʿayb is also sometimes considered an Arabian prophet, although he is more commonly associated with the biblical Jethro. A prophetic tradition (ḥadīth) attributed to Abū Dharr al-Ghifārī posits four Arab prophets: Hūd, Shuʿayb, Ṣāliḥ, and Muhammad himself (Al-Iḥsān fī taqrīb Ṣaḥīḥ Ibn Ḥibbān [ed. Shuʿayb al-Arnaʾūṭ; Beirut: Muʾassasat al-Risālah, 1988] 2:77–79).

28 These statistics are drawn from The Quranic Arabic Corpus, http://corpus.quran.com.

29 As it happens, in identifying Hūd with Eber, Abraham Geiger was building on the opinion of some Muslim scholars (as he notes in Was hat Mohammed aus dem Judenthume aufgenommen? [2nd ed.; Leipzig: M. W. Kaufmann, 1902] 111–12), though he was presenting new arguments to this effect. While some Muslim authorities identified Hūd with Eber (Ar. ʿᾹbir), others considered Hūd a son of Eber. See Badr al-Dīn al-ʿAynī, ʿUmdat al-qārī: sharḥ Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī (25 vols.; Beirut: Dār Iḥyāʾ al-Turāth al-ʿArabī, n.d.) 15:225; Wahb b. Munabbih, Kitāb al-tījān fī mulūk Ḥimyar (ed. ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz al-Maqāliḥ; Sana’a: Markaz al-Dirāsāt wa-l-Abḥāth al-Yamaniyyah, AH 1347) 37.

30 QB, 264.

31 Ibid., 265.

32 BDB, 150. The adjective seems to have the same meaning when applied in Genesis 6:4 to the nephilīm, and the Septuagint’s translation of it there as “giants” (γίγαντεσ) seems interpretive. Most modern translations thus render gibbōrīm as “mighty men” or “heroes” (e.g., ESV, NRSV, ISV). For a discussion and review of previous scholarship on this term, see Archie T. Wright, The Origin of Evil Spirits: The Reception of Genesis 6. 1—4 in Early Jewish Literature (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2005) 83–89.

33 Marcus Jastrow, A Dictionary of the Targumim, the Talmud Bavli and Yerushalmi, and the Midrashic Literature (New York: The Judaica Press, 1996 [1903]) 234.

34 After recounting the destruction of ʿᾹd, this text continues with the story of Ṣāliḥ, who similarly describes his people (the Thamūd) as “successors after ʿᾹd” (Q 7:74).

35 Cf. Q 51:41–46.

36 Fawzi Zayadine and Saba Farès-Drappeau, “Two North-Arabian Inscriptions from the Temple of Lāt at Wādī Ramm,” ADAJ 42 (1998) 255–58, at 256.

37 Robert Hoyland, “Mount Nebo, Jabal Ramm, and the Status of Christian Palestinian Aramaic and Old Arabic in Late Roman Palestine and Arabia,” Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies 40 (2010) 29–45, at 39.

38 Zayadine and Farès-Drappeau, “Two North-Arabian Inscriptions,” 257, citing J. Savignac, “Notes de voyage. Le sanctuaire d’Allat à Iram,” RB 41 (1932) 581–97, at 591–92.

39 See the insightful critical survey by Joseph Witztum, “The Syriac Milieu of the Quran: The Recasting of Biblical Narratives” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2011) 10–65.

40 Die syro-aramäische Lesart des Koran. Ein Beitrag zur Entschlüsselung der Koransprache (Berlin: Das Arabische Buch, 2000); translated as The Syro-Aramaic Reading of the Koran: A Contribution to the Decoding of the Language of the Koran (Berlin: H. Schiler, 2007).

41 For example, Sidney Griffith, “Syriacisms in the ‘Arabic Qur’ān’: Who Were ‘Those Who Said “Allāh Is Third of Three”’ according to al-Mā’ida 73?,” in A Word Fitly Spoken: Studies in Medieval Exegesis of the Hebrew Bible and the Qurʾān; Presented to Haggai Ben-Shammai (ed. Meir M. Bar-Asher et al.; Jerusalem: The Ben-Zvi Institute for the History of Jewish Communities in the East, 2007) 83–110.

42 Griffith, “Christian Lore and the Arabic Qurʾān,” 109-37; Witztum, The Syriac Milieu of the Quran, and Tommaso Tesei, “The Prophecy of Ḏū-l-Qarnayn (Q 18:83-102) and the Origins of the Qurʾānic Corpus,” in Miscellanea Arabica 2013-14 (ed. Angelo Arioli; Rome: Arcane Editrice, 2014) 273–90.

43 See, in particular, Zellentin, The Qurʾān’s Legal Culture (cited in n. 2), and idem, “Judaeo-Christian Legal Culture and the Qurʾān: The Case of Ritual Slaughter and the Consumption of Animal Blood,” in Jewish Christianity and the Origins of Islam (ed. Francisco del Río Sánchez; Turnhout: Brepols, 2018) 117–59.

44 E.g., Gabriel Reynolds, “On the Qur’anic Accusation of Scriptural Falsification (Taḥrīf) and Christian Anti-Jewish Polemic,” JAOS 130 (2010) 189–202.

45 E.g., Nicolai Sinai, “The Eschatological Kerygma of the Early Qur’an,” in Apocalypticism and Eschatology in Late Antiquity: Encounters in the Abrahamic Religions, 6th–8th Centuries (ed. Hagit Amirav, Emmanouela Grypeou, and Guy Stroumsa; Late Antique History and Religion 17; Leuven: Peeters, 2017) 219–66. See also Emran el-Badawi, The Qurʾān and the Aramaic Gospel Traditions (New York: Routledge, 2014) esp. 165–206.

46 E.g. Gabriel S. Reynolds, “A Reflection on Two Qurʾānic Words (Iblīs and Jūdī), with Attention to the Theories of A. Mingana,” JAOS 124 (2004) 675–89.

47 QB, 12 et passim.

48 See Sinai’s excellent study (cited in n. 45), which assumes the particular relevance of Syriac literature based on a number of parallel features highlighted by Tor Andrae between this literature and the Qur’an (ibid., 233). However, these features (such as concern for orphans and the poor or the importance of fearing God) are quite widespread and thus not exclusive to Syriac Christian literature. See also Witztum’s discussion of potential para-biblical and post-biblical precedents to the qur’anic story of the Kaʿba’s foundation by Abraham and Ishmael (“The Syriac Milieu,” 154–87), as well as Holger Zellentin’s “The Synchronic and the Diachronic Qurʾān,” 113, which speaks of “the Scriptural as well as the rabbinic and Syriac Christian traditions” in describing the Qur’an’s intertexts.

49 For compelling applications of this methodology, see Reynolds’s own analyses in The Qurʾān and Its Biblical Subtext, which take systematic account of both Jewish and non-Syriac Christian sources (e.g., pp. 46–54 on the angelic prostration to Adam).

50 As suggested by a number of scholars (e.g., Witztum, “The Syriac Milieu,” 261–64).

51 For a brief overview of this subject, see David G. K. Taylor, “Bilingualism and Diglossia in Late Antique Syria and Mesopotamia,” in Bilingualism in Ancient Society: Language Contact and the Written Text (ed. J. N. Adams, Mark Janse, and Simon Swain; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) 298–331, esp. 300–305.

52 In a recent article, Guillaume Dye discusses various qur’anic terms, phrases, and syntactical features to argue that the Qur’an’s author(s), and possibly also members of its audience, had Syriac competence (“Traces of Bilingualism/Multilingualism in Qurʾānic Arabic,” in Arabic in Context: Celebrating 400 Years of Arabic at Leiden University [ed. Ahmad al-Jallad; Leiden: Brill, 2017] 337–71). While the article is thought-provoking, some of its examples are unconvincing. For example, following Christoph Luxenberg, Dye asserts that understanding the term kathīr in Q 20:33–34 as “much” yields an “awkward” translation of these verses as “so that we may glorify You much and remember You much” (ibid., 345). He thus proposes that kathīr in these verses means “constantly,” a meaning that he believes this term acquired under the influence of Syriac ku(t)tārā (ibid., 345–46). However, the Qur’an elsewhere criticizes those who remember God only “a little” (wa-yadhkurūna llāha qalīlan, Q 4:142), using the term qalīl that is the clear antonym of kathīr (see, e.g., Q 2:249, 9:82). In light of this criticism, it seems perfectly logical for the Qur’an to present ample remembrance of God as a virtue.

53 Fergus Millar, “The Evolution of the Syrian Orthodox Church in the Pre-Islamic Period: From Greek to Syriac?,” JECS 21 (2013) 43–92. As Millar points out, “Greek remained in this period, for the ‘orthodox’ as for the Chalcedonians, the established language of public expression, as used in theological treatises, in letters to bishops or groups of bishops from other areas, and in communications with the church of Constantinople and with the emperors” (ibid., 71).

54 See Sidney H. Griffith, “From Aramaic to Arabic: The Language of the Monasteries of Palestine in the Byzantine and Early Islamic Periods,” DOP 51 (1997) 11–31, esp. 11–24. In fact, all extant manuscripts written in Christian Palestinian Aramaic seem to be translations of Greek works, not original compositions (ibid., 19).

55 According to Leah Di Segni, “Greek was the dominant written language in late antique Palestine and Arabia, especially among the Christians, who by the sixth century were the majority of the population in the region” (“Greek Inscriptions in Transition from the Byzantine to the Early Islamic Period,” in From Hellenism to Islam: Cultural and Linguistic Change in the Roman Near East [ed. Hannah M. Cotton et al.; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009] 352–73, at 356).

56 A recent discussion of the languages spoken in the Nabatean realm can be found in Michael C. A. Macdonald, “Ancient Arabia and the Written Word,” in The Development of Arabic as a Written Language (ed. Michael C. A. Macdonald; Oxford: Archaeopress, 2010) 5–27, esp. 19–20. On the linguistic diversity of Nessana and the importance of Greek, see Rachel Stroumsa, “Greek and Arabic in Nessana,” in Documents and the History of the Early Islamic World (ed. A.T. Schubert and P.M. Sijpesteijn; Islamic History and Civilization: Studies and Texts, 111; Leiden: Brill, 2015) 143–57.

57 For a recent discussion of these inscriptions and references to earlier literature, see Greg Fisher et al., “Romans, Persians, Arabs, and Christianity in the Sixth Century,” in Arabs and Empires Before Islam (ed. Greg Fisher; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015) 313–67.

58 See Pierre-Louis Gatier, “Les Jafnides dans l’épigraphie grecque au VI^e siècle,” in Les Jafnides: Des rois arabe au service de Byzance (VI ^esiècle de l’ère chrétienne) (ed. Denis Genequand and Christian Julien Robin; Paris: Éditions de Boccard, 2015) 193–222. As Millar notes, “[t]he important role in the evolution of the ‘orthodox’ church played by Arethas [al-Ḥārith] and his son Mundhir … will have been mediated through the use of Greek” (“Evolution of the Syrian Orthodox Church,” 83).

59 Of the 137 subscriptions to this letter, 20 were written in Greek and the rest in Syriac (which in this context might have meant Christian Palestinian Aramaic). See Fergus Millar, “Christian Monasticism in Roman Arabia at the Birth of Mahomet,” Semitica et Classica 2 (2009) 97–115, at 107.

60 See, most recently, Ahmad al-Jallad and Ali al-Manaser, “New Epigraphica from Jordan I: A Pre-Islamic Arabic Inscription in Greek Letters and a Greek Inscription from North-Eastern Jordan,” Arabian Epigraphic Notes 1 (2015) 51–70; and idem, “New Epigraphica from Jordan II: Three Safaitic-Greek Partial Bilingual Inscriptions,” Arabian Epigraphic Notes 2 (2016) 55–66. According to al-Jallad and al-Manaser, “the rarity of Greek epigraphy in the desert would not necessarily reflect an absence of knowledge of the language or script, but rather the fact that Greek did [not] have a position in the rock art tradition of the nomads” (ibid., 61).

61 For a similar argument about the importance of Greek Christianity, see now also Juan Cole, “Paradosis and Monotheism: A Late Antique Approach to the Meaning of Islām in the Quran,” BSOAS 82 (2019) 405–25, esp. 410–12. I thank Professor Cole for sharing his article with me.

62 By “intertextual approach” here I mean particularly the attempt to find biblical or biblically inspired precedents for various qur’anic statements. Naturally, other corpora of pre-Islamic texts can also serve as precedents in a similar capacity.