Jesus is God (or not)

The Story of Cain and the Burial of Abel's Body
 

By far the greatest number of portions of the quran Qur�an that can be shown to have pre-Islamic origins are those that relate to Jewish folklore and other fables that were woven around Biblical narratives in the Old Testament. The quran Qur�an has been described as "a compendium of Talmudic Judaism" as a result of the wealth of Midrashic and Mishnaic material that has been repeated in it. It is well-known that Muhammad could read neither the Scripture of the Jews nor their folklore and, as he heard stories of Jewish antiquity repeated in market-places and elsewhere, he was unable to distinguish fact from fable and both appear side-by-side in his holy book. The evidences appear to disprove the claim that the quran Qur�an was revealed to him from above and the conclusion can hardly be resisted that it represents various materials that came to him from conversations, story-telling and other sources in day-to-day contact with the Jews in Arabia.
 

The quranic Qur�anic account of the murder of Abel by his unrighteous brother Cain is a typical mixture of elements from the Bible, Midrash and Mishnah. It is set out in Surah 5. 30-35 and begins with a statement that when they each presented an offering to God only the sacrifice of one of them was accepted. Thus far it records Biblical material (Genesis 4.4) but it then records a dialogue between the two brothers (who are not named) in which the one whose offering was rejected threatens to slay the other. The righteous brother responds by reaffirming his faith in God and states he will not attempt to slay him in turn (Surah 5. 30-32). There is no parallel for this in Genesis but it is typical of the quranic Qur�anic tendency to record conversations between unbelievers and the righteous, particularly where the former threaten the latter (an experience Muhammad himself endured regularly during his years in Mecca). Despite the faithful brother's response his wicked brother killed him. The passage then proceeds to add this incident which also has no parallel in the Biblical narrative:
 

Then Allah sent a raven who scratched in the ground to show him how to hide the shame of his brother. Surah 5.34
 

There is an analogy, however, to this statement in a rabbinical work of Jewish fables and myths known as the Pirke Rabbi Eliezer contained in the section of Talmudic writings known as the Midrash. It predates the quran Qur�an by many centuries. In this book it is said that Adam and Eve wept when they found Abel's body and did not know what to do with it as burial was unknown to them. Then came a raven, whose companion had died, and it took its body, scratched in the earth, and buried it before their eyes. Adam then decided to do likewise and he buried Abel's body in the earth.
 

The only difference between the incident in the quran Qur�an and the story in the Midrash is that Cain is recorded as burying Abel's body in the former and Adam in the latter. Otherwise the sequel is the same. The slight variation is typical of what might be expected in the record of a man who was relying exclusively on hearsay and secondary sources because he could not read the books his Jewish storytellers were quoting. That he has borrowed from a fable in Jewish folklore, however, seems obvious. The next verse, however, also can be shown to have been derived from Talmudic material, in this case the Mishnah. It reads:
 

For that reason we inscribed for the Children of Israel that if anyone slew another person, other than for murder or spreading corruption in the earth, it would be as if he slew all mankind; and if anyone saved the life of one it would be as if he had saved all mankind. Surah 5.35
 

This verse appears to have no connection with the story preceding it. Why the life or death of one person whould be as the salvation or destruction of all mankind is not clear. The Mishnah, however, has an interesting passage indicating its source and the connection between them:
 

We find it said in the case of Cain who murdered his brother, "The voice of thy brother's bloods crieth" (Genesis 4.10). It is not said here blood in the singular, but bloods in the plural, that is, his own blood and the blood of his seed. Man was created single in order to show that to him who kills a single individual it shall be reckoned that he has slain the whole race, but to him who preserves the life of a single individual it is counted that he hath preserved the whole race.