On the one hand, the Qur’an presents the Jews as righteous followers of the words of God (e.g. Q. 3:113–114), as God’s preferred people (Q. 2:47, Q. 2:122), and as monotheists in covenant with Him (e.g. Q. 2:40, ʿahd; Q. 5:12, Q. 2:63 mithāq) (see Lumbard, ‘Covenant and Covenants’; Ebstein, ‘Covenants (Religious) Pre-Eternal’; Firestone, ‘Is There A Notion’), whose food Muslims may eat (Q. 5:5), whose women Muslims may marry (Q. 5:5), and whose houses of prayer are places where God’s name is mentioned and, as such, are worthy of Muslim protection (Q. 22:40). On the other hand, the Qur’an also presents Jews as violators of their covenant with God (e.g. Q. 3:187). They are charged with killing their own prophets (Q. 2:91; Q. 3:181) (see Reynolds, ‘On the Qur’ān and the Theme of Jews’), and perceived to be the people most violently opposed to those who believe in God and His Prophet (Q. 5:82). They are said to be full of blasphemy and irreverence bordering on wickedness (e.g. Q. 5:41–42) and, perhaps even worse, as intentional misconstruers of the word of God (e.g. Q. 4:46, Q. 2:75ff ). Some of the Jewish ritual practices are understood to constitute punishment for earlier Jewish bad behaviour (Q. 4:160; on the laws of kashrut in particular, see Q. 6:146) (see Maghen, ‘After Hardship Cometh Ease’).
In one of the more sarcastic of the Qur’an’s taunts against the Jews, the Qur’an reproaches the Jews for claiming that God is miserly and ungenerous (Q5:64). Neither the Qur’an nor the exegetical commentaries understand the Jews’ words, presented here as a direct quote, as a literal statement about the hands of God. Rather, as the Qur’an’s response to the Jewish accusation reveals (He gives as He pleases), the statement is to be understood from the outset as a blasphemous metaphor about God’s beneficence. This understanding is embraced by the classical exegetes who explain that verse indicates that the Jews assert that God’s gifts and generosity are withheld (mumsik), God having pulled back (amsaka) from granting them to the Jews (al-Ṭabarī (224–310/838–932), Jāmīʿ al-bayān, vol. 10, p. 450; Muqātil b. Sulaymān (d. 150/767), in Tafsīr Muqātil, vol. 1, p. 327).
God’s Chained Hand in the Hebrew Bible and the Midrash
However, while the Hebrew Bible never accuses God of hand-chained parsimoniousness, it does include statements about God’s hand being restrained, or, more accurately, God restraining His own hand. Some scholars have suggested these verses as possible sources for the Qur’an’s claim. Most commonly we find reference to a verse in Lamentations 2, where the text—traditionally ascribed to the prophet Jeremiah— relates that because of Israel’s sins, God desired to punish the nation with a military defeat at the hand of her enemy (a not uncommon cause-and-effect situation in the Bible). Lamentations 2:3 then ominously states that in ‘blazing anger’ God cut down all the might (lit., ‘horn’) of Israel and ‘has withdrawn His right hand in the presence of the foe’ (The Faces of the Chariot, pp. 467–469; and Sells, ‘Finhās of Medina’, n. 34). God intentionally restrained Himself from defending His people against the oncoming enemy, and allowed the enemy to emerge victorious
A similar depiction of God’s restrained right hand appears in a non-canonical Jewish text closer in time to the appearance of the Qur’an, the pseudepigraphal fifth century 3 Enoch. This too has been suggested as a possible source for Q. 5:64. In 3 Enoch, R. Ishmael relates that the angel Metatron approached him and offered to bring him before God (referred to here as ha-Maqom, ‘the Place’), who, Metatron reports, sits despondent and dejected. R. Ishmael accompanies Metatron to heaven and finds God sitting with His right hand thrown behind Him, just as Metatron had described. Noting the similarity to Q. 5:64’s chained hand of God, David Halperin comments, ‘This suggests that some at least of the Hekhalot traditions were known to Jews in seventh century Arabia’ (Halperin, The Faces of the Chariot, appendix 2, p. 468; Der Ursprung des Islams, p. 252 n. 2). As scholars have previously noted, the Qur’an’s statements about Jews are often polemical declarations and should not be seen as factual historical testimony regarding actual Jewish practice or belief.
More recently, Holger Zellentin informally suggested to me a Talmudic source for Q. 5:64, a passage in BT Menahot ̣ 29b. God states that in the future a scholar named ʿAqiba ben Joseph would arise and expound mountains of rabbinic teaching on each crown. Zellentin posited that according to the rabbis God here holds Himself back, restrains His own hand, in order ‘to leave the interpretation of the Torah to the Rabbis’. Indeed, rabbinic teaching, here and elsewhere, celebrates the rabbinic enterprise of Torah explication as a sort of rabbinic-God partnership that is Divinely ordained. Zellentin, however, suggests that Q. 5:64 flips this rabbinic teaching on its head, using the Talmud’s own language to reject its claims (See Sidney Griffith, ‘Al-Naṣārā in the Qur’ān’). Unlike the rabbis, the Qur’an maintains that God does not restrain Himself in order to allow human participation in His revelation; what’s more, for the Qur’an the claim that He does so borders on sacrilege. Most importantly, the depiction of God in the Talmudic text bears no sense of being chained or restrained. Quite the opposite: when Moses comes upon God, he finds Him actively using His hand, studiously drawing seemingly unnecessary crowns on the tops of letters and, as Moses’ words imply, delaying His completion of the text and delivery of the written revelation to Moses.
Namely, while the overarching imagery of a restrained God in the Bible indeed resembles the picture described in the Qur’an, there are three key important differences. Most significantly, the statement in Q. 5:64 refers to God’s arm as maghlūla, physically fettered, bound by something external to Him; Lane defines ghull as an iron shackle put on either the neck or hand of a captive. What’s more, in both Hebrew texts God’s restrained arm results from His own purposeful action, a detail that does not appear in the words of the Qur’an’s Jews. The Jews say the hand of God is chained may imply, or indeed sounds as if, the Jews think a force external to God bested Him and fettered Him. Additionally, the Hebrew depictions do not understand the ramifications of God’s restrained hand in the same manner as does the Qur’an. As noted, though the Qur’an’s Jews draw a very physical picture of God here, they appear to mean it only metaphorically (though blasphemously), that God stingily refuses to share His bounty with them. As already mentioned, the Qur’an’s response to the Jews drives this home; the deity is not chained, says the Qur’an, rather both His hands are open wide. By contrast, the image of God’s withdrawn hand in the Hebrew texts conveys a staying of physical power, not a sense of financial withdrawal. This is especially clear in Lamentations, which specifies ‘heshiv ahor yemino mi-p ̣ ’nei oyev ([God] has withdrawn His right hand in the presence of the foe)’, meaning He held Himself back from fighting off the hordes when they struck.
- God in Chains in a Piyyut
- This is not to say that Q. 5:64’s idea of a chained God remains completely absent from the Jewish tradition. Tantalisingly, a God in chains appears in a piyyut by the prolific payyetan R. Eleʿazar ha-Kallir, who lived before the rise and spread of Islam and whose literary product constitutes a source that scholars have not noted before in their discussions of this Qur’anic claim. Piyyutim are liturgical poems that date to the Talmudic period (roughly the fourth through the seventh centuries), are recited as part of the prayer services on Sabbaths and holidays, and were often composed of midrashic material, frequently material that has since been lost to history. In the end, consistent use made the non-canonical canonical and piyyutim became part of the authorised prayer canon (see Mirsky, Ha-Piyyut; Hoffman, The Canonization, pp. 66–71; and Langer, ‘Kalir was a Tanna’).
The piyyut of relevance here, by ha-Kallir, belongs to the group of piyyutim recited on the ninth day of the month of Av, the day that commemorates the destruction of both the First and Second Temples, and the consequent loss of Jewish political autonomy and descent of Israel into national trauma and exile. Invoking the shock of the desecration and destruction that took place on the Ninth of Av, and basing itself on earlier midrashic texts, our piyyut opens by referencing an account that appears in Leviticus Rabbah (400–500 CE) 22:3 and BT Gittin 56b, describing what the ‘enemy’ (meaning, Titus of Rome) did when he invaded the Temple in 69 CE. Unlike the verses in Enoch and Lamentations, the piyyut describes God not simply forcing Himself into inaction but shackled, physically bound by something external to Him. What’s more, He is bound by iron chains (aziqim), the very same material indicated by the Qur’an’s maghlūla. It seems that this piyyut, a poem recited by Jews in synagogues on the day commemorating the destruction of not one but two Temples, presents us with precisely the scenario described in Q. 5:64, The Jews say God’s hand is chained.
It is significant to note that ha-Kallir’s piyyut is not the only Jewish text of the period to refer to God’s hand as fettered. An obscurely-phrased reference appears in the slightly earlier fifth–sixth century midrashic Pesiqta de-Rav Kahana, 13:9 (See Pesiqta de-Rav Kahana, ed. Dov Mandlebaum, vol. 1). The midrashic interpreters feign ignorance of the structure of Biblical Hebrew and, employing the rabbinic principle of Biblical interpretation which insists that there are no superfluous or missing elements in the text of the Bible, ask: Why does the Jeremiah text say ‘And he was bound in chains (ve-hu asur be-aziqim)’? Meaning, why does it not simply say ‘He (hu) was bound in chains’, without the connecting vav? Answering the question, R. Aḥa 40 tersely replies, ‘kivyachol hu ve-hu’ (‘As it were, he and he’). One was Jeremiah, the obvious topic of the sentence, while the other, as indicated by the phrase ‘and he’, was God, who should thus be understood as also bound in chains (See Sperber, The Bible in Aramaic, p. 228).
‘Behold I have freed you today from the chains (aziqim) that are on your hand’. In drawing a parallel between Jeremiah (who was chained by his hand specifically) and God, the midrash implies that God’s hand too was, as it were, chained. Despite the apparent rabbinic discomfort with the idea of a chained God, this same teaching and similar phrasing appear in another fifth-sixth century midrashic work from the Land of Israel, Lamentations Rabbah (Eichah Rabbah, also known as Eichah Rabbati). As in Pesiqta de-Rav Kahana, Lamentations Rabbah cites the teaching of R. Aḥa, who taught: ‘as it were (kivyachol), he and he were bound in chains’. According to this midrashic text, one should not read that Ezekiel was chained among the captives in exile but that God Himself was bound among the exiled of Judah, as it were.
Another, seemingly later, midrashic source moves up God’s enchaining Himself from the moment of the Israelites’ capture to the moment of the destruction itself, as in the piyyut, although in somewhat more subtle terms. In Deuteronomy Rabbah 30 (Devarim Rabbah [Deuteronomy Rabbah] in Midrash Rabbah ha-Mevo’ar, 5743), the early third century sage R. Joshua b. Levi taught that when the enemies came to destroy Jerusalem, 60,000 destructive angels (maziqin) were standing at the entrance to the Temple ready to repel and destroy them. According to R. Joshua b. Levi, this divine behavior is reported in Lamentations 2:3, which teaches that God ‘placed His right arm behind him in the presence of the enemy’. Says the piyyut, when the enemy came in to destroy the Temple, God’s hands were chained (ve-hu asur be-aziqim), and He did not prevent its defeat. In reciting this phrase every year, on the day that commemorates the destruction of the Temple(s) and the Jews’ subsequent traumatic exile from their homeland, the Jews, as the Qur’an reports, do in fact say that God and His hands were chained.
The intertextuality passage, (highlighted the passage that’s relevant).
And I saw the spirits of the Patriarchs Abraham Isaac and Jacob and the rest of the righteous whom they have brought up out of their graves and who have ascended to the Heaven (Raqirf). And they were praying before the Holy One, blessed be He, saying intheir prayer: “Lord of the Universe! How long wilt thou sit upon (thy) Throne like a mourner in the days of his mourning with thy right hand behind thee and not deliver thy children and reveal thy Kingdom in the world?
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