In The Golden Calf Between Bible and Qur’an: Scripture, Polemic, and Exegesis from Late Antiquity to Islam, Michael Pregill presents the most comprehensive exploration to date of the interpretive trajectory of the story of Israel’s idolatry at Sinai with the Golden Calf. Beginning with its appearance in texts of the Hebrew Bible (especially Exodus 32), he traces it through centuries of Jewish and Christian exegesis and retellings all the way to its appearance in the Qur’an (especially in Surah 20).
The first part (“Foundations”) examines the biblical beginnings of the story and its early Jewish interpretations. Originating as a polemic against the practice of using images in worship, the story was transformed by the Deuteronomistic aniconic “master narrative” of the Pentateuch into an account of idolatrous worship of false gods. The culpability of the Israelites and especially of Aaron, and the possibility of atonement, are early interpretive concerns. The second part (“Jews, Christians, and the Contested Legacy of Israel”) investigates the polemical, apologetical, and exegetical treatments of the story in the contested Jewish-Christian world of Late Antiquity, especially in Syria-Palestine. Christian interpretations tended to use the episode to disenfranchise the Jews, while Jewish interpretations tended to either minimize or deny the involvement of Aaron or the Israelites. A strand of Syriac Christian exegesis interestingly also seeks to find a justification for Aaron’s behavior, due to a belief in the Aaronic priestly lineage of Jesus. The third and final part (“The Qur’anic Calf Episode”) focuses on the qur’anic versions of the story, suggesting an interpretation of the main version of the story (Qur’an 20:83-98) that differs from the usual interpretations offered by both Western and Muslim scholarship. An impressive bibliography (including primary sources in at least six different ancient languages), along with scriptural and general indexes, round-out this painstakingly detailed and copiously referenced study.
Readers will be rewarded with articulate discussions and illuminating summaries of Jewish and Christian interpretations of the Calf story, especially from the lesser-known world of Syriac Christianity. But the ultimate focus is the qur’anic retelling, which stands out from its biblical precursor primarily in two details: the manufacture of the Calf is attributed to a character called al-sāmirī, who is subsequently exiled; and a seemingly magical process—“I took a handful from the messenger’s track and threw it” (Qur’an 20:96)—produces a cast image that lows, giving it the appearance of life. Typically, following the lead of Abraham Geiger, western scholars have attributed these unique details to the adoption into the Qur’an of Jewish exegetical traditions. Al-sāmirī has been interpreted as a qur’anic etiology for a separatist Samaritan community at the time of Muhammad. Pregill, however, demonstrates that the Jewish sources adduced for these traditions postdate the Qur’an and this material actually comes from Islamic elaborations on the qur’anic story.
Pregill argues that, far from being a derivative product of Jewish or Christian traditions, the version of the Calf story in the Qur’an is an intentional, sophisticated, and largely original reading and interpretive retelling of the Calf story as found in the Hebrew Bible, and only indirectly shaped by Jewish and Christian attitudes towards the story. Al-sāmirī is not a separate character at all, but rather an epithet applied to Aaron meaning “the Samarian.” This associates his leadership in the incident with the biblically disdained worship of the golden calves in the northern kingdom of Israel (often referred to as Samaria)—see I Kings 12. Aaron, that is, al-sāmirī, is not exiled but rather assigned the position of priest, who needs to maintain ritual purity (thus the words “Go, for it is for you in life to say ‘No touching’” [Qur’an 20:97]). Furthermore, no magical process is involved in manufacturing an animate image. The words “I took a handful from the messenger’s track and threw it” is a play on the word athar (“track”) which can also mean authoritative example. That is, Aaron attempted to follow the example of Moses, who had appointed him as khalifah, or deputy, in his absence, but then abandoned it for something he thought better at the time. The resulting Calf image was not magically animated but is simply described as an image of “a calf that lows” in parallel to Psalm 106:20, which refers to the story with the phrase “an ox that eats grass”.
Pregill’s reconstruction of the meaning of the qur’anic Calf story when it originally appeared is supported by much more detail than can be described here. To his credit, he carefully considers alternate interpretations and admits when his reasoning is speculative—for example, when he proposes that the conflicts of the proto-Muslim community in Medina with the Jewish tribes in this area provides a socio-historical context for the qur’anic story, or when he suggests that the biblical version of the story was available in Arabia through Ethiopian channels.
More generally, Pregill uses the results of his investigation to argue for a shift in western scholarship of the Qur’an away from an “influence paradigm” that approaches the Qur’an as a passive (and often confused) recipient of outside Jewish and Christian influences. Instead, he champions a view of the Qur’an as an active and deliberate participant in the ongoing development of the biblical tradition and opines that the term “rewritten Bible” might provide an accurate rubric for describing the Qur’an’s contribution. Similarly, he decries the reliance of scholars on tafsir (the tradition of Muslim Qur’anic interpretation) as a source for elucidating the meaning of the Qur’an at the time of its original appearance—in western hands the use of tafsir has too often been combined with anti-Islamic polemic that devalues the Qur’an, and, besides, these extra-qur’anic Islamic traditions are problematic due to their relatively late date and theological tendencies.
Pregill’s work is an important contribution, both as a model for exploring scriptural intertextuality and as a prolegomenon to a similarly detailed study of the Calf story in Islamic, Christian, and Jewish (and perhaps also modern secular) traditions after the Qur’an. This volume will be of as much interest to biblical scholars and historians of religion as to scholars of the Qur’an.
Franz Volker Greifenhagen is professor of religious studies at Luther College, University of Regina, Canada.
Franz Volker Greifenhagen
Date Of Review:
December 17, 2022