1. Both the Koran and the Talmud record the transformation of sinners into monkeys. While in the Talmud this punishment applies to some of the people involved in the construction of the Tower of Babel, in the Koran it is a punishment specifically for Jews who have violated the Sabbath commandment; see also the allusion to this in Q 4:47. The text from the Talmud proves above all that the transformation into monkeys as punishment is a narrative topos that occurs in different contexts.
2. Babylonischer Talmud, Sanhedrin, 109a: “The contemporaries of division have no part in the future world.” [Mishnah, Sanhedrin, 11:3] What did they do? In the school of Rabbi Shilah they said: Let us build a tower, climb into heaven, and break it with axes, so that its waters may flow out. In the West they laughed about it; So they should have built it on a mountain!? Rather, said Rabbi Jermeja b. Eleazar, they divided into three groups; one said: We will go up there and live there; one said: We will go up there and practice idolatry; and one said: We will go up there and make war [with God]. Those who said, We will go up and live there, God scattered them; those who said, We will go up and make war, became monkeys, spirits, ghosts, and demons; And of those who said, We will go up and practice idolatry there, it is said, For the Lord confused the language of all the earth. [Genesis 11:9]

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The Qur’an refers three times to humans being changed into apes. In two cases (2:65; 4:163–166), the change represents divine punishment meted out to people who somehow broke the Sabbath, though the exact violation is not articulated. In the third case, God curses certain people with whom He is angry and makes some of them apes and pigs (5:60).

1. Identifying the Adversary
2. The three passages considered here serve to validate a new religious movement at the same time that they counter the legitimacy of those members of an establishment religion that oppose it. As noted above, two of these passages associate God’s changing some humans into apes within the thematic context of Sabbath violation. The third, with which we begin our textual inquiry, omits the direct association with the Sabbath. This passage is part of a larger defensive discourse condemning Jews and Christians, referred to collectively as Scriptuaries (“People of the Book”), by identifying them as allies working together in opposition to the emergent community of Believers (5:51). It also condemns slackers within the community itself: “those in whose hearts is a sickness who are quick to (turn to) them” (5:52), criticizes those in the community “who turn back from religion” (5:54), rebukes “those who take [as friends or comrades] the People of the Book and unbelievers (al-kuffār—5:57), and condemns those who ridicule the call to prayer (5:58). Reference to People of the Book in 5:59 is meant to indicate both Jews and Christians since it appears within the same passage as the explicit caution against taking Jews and Christians as allies (5:51).

Q. 5:59–60 and the larger context in which it appears (much of chapter ijive) are clearly polemical and argue defensively against outsiders perceived as hostile in their criticism, along with those within the community labeled as backsliders who are influenced by them. The interpretive literature (tafsīr and qiṣas al-anbiyāʾ) tends to identify those who were changed into apes as Jews and those who were changed into pigs as Christians. There is no mention of the Sabbath in the entire chapter, but readers and commentators have intuitively associated these verses with the Qur’anic references to the Sabbath because of the repeated theme of God transforming people into apes in association with Sabbath desecration. For Islamic interpretive responses, see:

Uri Rubin, “Apes, Pigs and the Islamic Identity,” in Uri Rubin and David Wasserstein (eds.), Israel Oriental Studies XVII, 1997, 89–105; Aluma Solnik, “Based on Qur’an Verses, Interpretations, and Traditions, Muslim Clerics State: The Jews are the Descendants of Apes, Pigs, and Other Animals,” in Andrew Bostom (ed.), The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism (Amherst: Prometheus, 2008), 633–640

1. Apes and the Sabbath Problem
2. The two qur’anic references in which God turns Israelites into apes for breaking the Sabbath represent a different theme even though they ijit within a category of discourse, along with the material just examined, intended to authenticate a new religious movement in the face of establishment critique. The two references to God changing Israelites into apes for transgressing the Sabbath occur in widely different locations in the Qur’an, but the qur’anic editors associated them together. This is evident from, among other indications, their placement immediately or shortly after a repeated reference to God providing shade to the Israelites with the cloud (See Num. 14:14; Ps. 105:39; Cf. Ex. 13:21–22; 33:9–10; 40:34–38; Num. 9:15–23), feeding them with quail and manna (See Ex. 16:1–36; Num. 11:4–9, 16–23, 31–34), and their sins associated with some kind of evil speech or behavior after having been told to enter a town while prostrating and saying ḥiṭṭa (Q. 2:57–59; 7: 160b–162).

The Covenant, the Sabbath, and Failure

The first reference associates Israelite Sabbath transgression with God’s covenant in a context that evokes the Jewish memory of divine revelation at Mount Sinai.

1. The Town That was by the Sea
2. As with the other case of God changing humans who transgressed the Sabbath into apes examined above, this segment appears in the Qur’an within a series of references with well-known Biblical parallels (Q. 7:103–160): Moses confronting Pharaoh in Egypt, divine plagues against Pharaoh’s kin (āl ijirʿawn), divine redemption from Egyptian evil, Israel crossing the sea and then desiring Moses to make for them gods, God showing himself to Moses, God writing divine words on the Tablets, the sin of the calf (the “molten calf” of Ex. 32:4), the division of the tribes, and Moses striking the rock with his staff for water. This set of vignettes has less emphasis on Israel backsliding and seems more like a straightforward retelling or summarizing of well-known stories known also from their biblical contexts. Included within these vignettes, however, is another interpolation, this time placing Muhammad (unnamed), the ummī prophet, in relation to Moses (7:157–158).

It occurs in this form (form II) only once in the Qur’an, but the same verb form (wazn) is common in other Arabic literatures to designate leading an animal to water. The sense here is that the ijish came to the people of the town because they were steered or directed there. It was purposeful that the ijish came only on the Sabbath day. The following sentence explains why: “Thus We tested them about that which they would transgress.” The most fruitful inquiry on the matter thus far has been the earliest, made by Heinrich Speyer, who notes parallels in both Biblical and Rabbinic literatures in his Die Biblischen Erzählungen im Quran (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1931, 313–314; see Ilse Lichtenstadter, “And Become Ye Accursed Apes,” JSAI 1991, 153–175; reprinted in Andrew Rippen (ed.), The Qur’an: Style and Contents (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate [2001]), 61–83). He suggests a parallel with the legend of the river known as “Sambatyon,” which “drags rocks all the days of the week, but on the Sabbath it rests . . .” (Bereshit Rabba 11:5. Speyer and Lichtenstadter). Speyer also notes a parallel with the Babylonian Talmud, Qiddushin 72a. Today they have turned away from the Almighty. A ijishpond overflowed on the Sabbath, so they went and ijished in it on the Sabbath. Rabbi Ahi son of R. Yoshia announced a ban [or curse] on them, so they apostatized (or were destroyed)”. A reference to the violation of the Sabbath by ijishing that was not noted by Speyer can be found in the Palestinian Talmud Shabbat 7:10: “The rabbis of Caesarea say that one who ijishes or kills anything [on the Sabbath] is liable [for transgressing] because [of the rule forbidding] reaping and binding [on the Sabbath].

The most obvious parallel to the motif of the test determining whether they would observe the Sabbath when tempted otherwise is the biblical story of the manna, which fell on all days of the week except the Sabbath. God says to Moses, “I will rain down bread for you from the sky, and the people shall go out and gather each day that day’s portion—that I may thus test them, to see whether they will follow my instructions or not” (Ex. 16:4). According to the biblical narrative, the people failed the test three times. The Israelites were instructed to gather only enough manna each day that was necessary to fulijill their immediate need for eating. In their ijirst failure, some tried to gather more than enough for their needs, but they ended up with exactly the same quantity as everybody else (Ex. 16: 16–18). They are also told not to hoard the manna. They should consume what is needed and not save it for the following day. Yet when some tried to hoard it, it became infested with maggots and stank (Ex. 16: 19–20). And ijinally, they were told that they would receive a double portion on the day before the Sabbath; they were instructed to prepare what was needed for two days and to put some aside for the morrow for it would not become foul. Yet some nevertheless went out on the Sabbath to collect more. They found nothing (Ex. 16:22–27). The Qur’anic telling reverses the sequence. Rather than the situation in the Bible in which food appears every day except the Sabbath, the Qur’an tells of food appearing only on the Sabbath day when the people are forbidden to collect it.

The thematic parallels with pre-Islamic monotheistic tradition in Bible and Rabbinic literature are undeniable: ijishing on the Sabbath, a divine test over maintaining Sabbath prohibitions, strange and unnatural phenomena associated with water and food, the division of the misbehaving community into three sub-groups, changing humans into apes, and divine mercy for those who did not sin. But there appears to be no particular legend or tradition to which the Qur’an is pointing when it produces these images and themes. While the individual motifs exist in local and neighboring literatures contemporary to the emergence of Islam, there is no parallel story, no narrative “smoking gun,” no coherent tale or legend upon which the Qur’an relies in the development of its message.