Heavenly Cords (Prof. van Bladel)

Many traditions of the ancient Mediterranean and Near East maintained that certain purified persons are able, either physically or psychically, to ascend to the upper reaches of the sky, sometimes into the presence of the creator God himself who resided at the uppermost point of the cosmos. The notion of heavenly ascent by the purified is found in ancient Egyptian beliefs, in Mazdaism, in Greek and Latin philosophical traditions, in Judaean tradition and its gentile Christian offshoots, Manichaeism, and Mandaeism.

According to a very old view, described explicitly or, sometimes implied, in various books of the Hebrew Bible and in the New Testament, heaven (or a series of heavens) lies above the mostly flat earth like the dome of a building or tent, forming the upper boundary of the physical world

In the sixth century, and during Muhammad’s lifetime, Christians of different schools of thought in the eastern Mediterranean region were arguing, at times heatedly, over which of these two cosmic pictures was the true one: the Hebrew or the Hellenic? The debate involved a vexed question with a long and pre-Christian pedigree: to what extent scripture was to be interpreted allegorically. This was a part of a debate taking place among the leaders of Byzantine society: the 540s and 550s witnessed both Byzantine imperial edicts against Origenism, and what were seen as its allegorical excesses, and also a repudiation of the Antiochene school of exegesis, adhered to by many important members of the Church of the East outside the Roman Empire, which held to a cosmology adhering more closely to the literal interpretation of scripture. Entering into the debate was John Philoponus, a Christian philosopher of sixth-century Alexandria, who wrote his commentary on Genesis to prove, against earlier, Antiochene, theologians like Theodore of Mopsuestia, that the scriptural account of creation described a spherical, geocentric world in accord with the Ptolemaic cosmology.12 Although Philoponus is today best known for his arguments against important aspects of Aristotelian physics and cosmology, here he can be seen to argue against those who wish to take the Bible’s cosmology literally. He makes the case that Ptolemy’s model of a spherical cosmos in fact follows the intended and true meaning of Moses’ book of Genesis.13

On the other hand, Cosmas Indicopleustes wrote his contentious Christian Topography in the 540s and 550s to prove that the spherical, geocentric world-picture of the erroneous, pagan Hellenes contradicted that of the Hebrew prophets. Cosmas was an Alexandrian with sympathies towards the Church of the East, who had travelled through the Red Sea to east Africa, Iran, and India, and who received instruction from the East Syrian churchman Mär Abä on the latter’s visit to Egypt. His Christian Topography has been shown to be aimed directly at John Philoponus and the Hellenic, spherical world-model he supported.14 It was enough for Cosmas to cite the scriptures, interpreted quite literally, to arrive at the truth. One of his favourite verses for this argument was Isaiah 40:22, “It is he (God) who sits above the circle of the earth, and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers; who stretches out the heavens like a curtain, and spreads them like a tent (õhel, Greek LXX skënë) to live in”. He also used Psalm 104:2 several times: “You stretch out the heavens like a tent-screen (vería, LXX dérris)”. Both of these Cosmas took as literal descriptions of the heavens, and since they came from prophets, their word was as good as the words of God.

A number of Syrian churchmen, notably but not only the Easterners working in the tradition of Theodore of Mopsuestia, took the view of the sky as an edifice for granted. Narsai (d. c. 503), the first head of the school of Nisibis, in his homilies on creation, described God’s fashioning of the firmament of heaven in these terms: “Like a roof upon the top of the house he stretched out the firmament / that the house below, the domain of earth, might be complete”. ayk tatlila l-bayta da-l-thết mtah la-rqiả | d-nehwê mamlû dûkkat ara l-bayta da-lel.” Also “He finished building the heaven and earth as a spacious house” šaklel wa-bná šmayya w-ara bayta rwiha. Jacob of Serugh (d. 521) wrote similarly on the shape of the world in his Hexaemeron homilies.” A further witness to the discussion is a Syriac hymn, composed c. 543-554, describing a domed church in Edessa as a microcosm of the world, its dome being the counterpart of the sky. This is the earliest known text to make a church edifice to be a microcosm, and it shows that the debates over cosmology were meaningful to more than a small number of theologians.20 Clearly the Ptolemaic cosmology was not taken for granted in the Aramaean part of Asia in the sixth century. It was, rather, controversial.

Quranic sabab

The Arabic word sabab (pl. asbab) occurs in five passages in the Quran, traditionally interpreted to mean “way”, “means”, or “rope”, depending on the context. However, it will become evident below that the Quran in every instance refers to something more specific than just “ways”. The asbab are, rather, some kind of ropes or cords that support or run along the high edifice of heaven and which can be traversed physically by people who arrive at them. In effect, asbab in the Quran are “heavenly ways” or “heavenly courses” which humans might attempt to traverse to gain access to the highest reaches of heaven but that God alone controls.

1. The Syriac Alexander Legend (to be distinguished from the better- known Alexander Romance, a different work) is an apocalyptic text composed in Syriac in 629 or 630 in support of the Byzantine emperor Heraclius shortly after he and his armies defeated the Sasanian Persians, about the time he restored the relic of the True Cross to Jerusalem.” The Alexander Legend prefigured Heraclius with Alexander the Great portrayed as a pious, Christ-awaiting Christian world-emperor who ventured to the boundaries of the world: westward, eastward, northward, and then southward. In describing the shape of the world, bounded by an ocean. on all sides and covered by a dome, the text shares its cosmological model with the Bible. Some of the story told in this Syriac Alexander Legend derives, apparently through a lost and perhaps oral Aramaic tradition, from the ancient tale of Gilgamesh, including the idea that Alexander, like Gilgamesh, follows the sun through its course from the place it sets towards the place where it rises again in the East. In the Alexander Legend the place of the sun’s setting is at the fetid and deadly waters of the ocean at the world’s western edge. Alexander cannot cross the water but enters and follows the sun’s conduit, evidently a heavenly course leading beyond the dome of heaven or a similarly difficult passage. This way is called “the window of the heavens” (kawwteh da-šmayya) in the Syriac text. As shown in detail elsewhere, this Alexander Legend again, composed about 630 is retold with modifications in the Quran 18:83-102.24 The quranic passage matches the Syriac Alexander Legend precisely, relating the same events in exactly the same order. Therefore the Syriac text becomes in effect a key to understanding some of the obscurities of Q 18:83-102. In the quranic retelling.(edited)
2. Dhū l-Qarnayn, “the two-horned one”, who stands for Alexander (also described as having horns in the Alexander Legend) follows a sabab three times on his journey to the west, the east, and the north.25 In Q 18:83-102, the word sabab referred not just to the “ways” that Dhũ 1- Qarnayn travelled but rather to a special kind of heavenly conduit like that described in the Legend, when Alexander follows the sun through “the window of heaven”.