In European intellectual history, since the age of the enlightenment, Prophecy and knowledge have been merely antagonists. In this paper, I will argue that the Qur’anic prophets do figure as bearers of knowledge. I will concentrate on one prophet of the Qur’an who is not yet comprehensively studied, the prophet Joseph, a representative of a prophetic persona who is connected in Qur’anic discourse with a particular epistemic notion that may be described as a revelation of God from below, instead of the otherwise prominent and often underlined concept of a descent of His word from up high. I will argue that the special role Joseph plays among the other prophets in the Qur’an is connected with his relation to late antique wisdom traditions.1
1. Scholarly-historical Preliminary Remarks
When looking at Theodor Nöldeke’s History of the Qurʾān, we immediately find a straightforward explanation of what a prophet is: “The essence of a prophet”, writes Nöldeke, “is that his mind becomes so filled and taken by a religious idea that he ultimately feels compelled, as though driven by a divine force, to announce that idea to his peers as a God-given truth.”2 And he proceeds:
That Muḥammad was a true prophet must be conceded if one (…) properly interprets the notion of prophethood. One could perhaps object that the main tenets of his teaching are not the product of his own mind but rather originate from Jews and Christians. While the best parts of Islam certainly do have this origin, the way Muḥammad utilized these precures, how he considered them a revelation descended from God, destined to be preached to all mankind, shows him to be a true prophet.3
In a brief glance at the opening chapter of Nöldeke’s book further terminology springs to the eye: fanaticism, extasy, an inner voice that leaves the prophet no rest.
Nöldeke’s view of the prophet of the Qur’an was certainly inspired not only by the Islamic hagiographical literature – as was often said4 –, but also by the contemporary scholarship of the prophets of the Old Testament. Scholars like Herman Gunkel had pictured the prophets of Israel, according to an ideal of German romanticism, as culturally productive geniuses, who, in the words of Northrup Frye, had “a comprehensive view of the human situation”.5 The prophets in 19th century Qur’anic and Biblical scholarship were simultaneously what Abraham Heschel ironically called “some of the most disturbing people who ever lived”,6 and the noble geniuses of their time, passive media of divine inspiration, comparable to a modern-day artist or musician, who experiences the artistic process of composing a song as the product of someone else’s creativity. Islamic and particularly Qur’anic Studies are equally rooted in the 19th century’s enthusiasm with prophecy. Scholars like Nöldeke departed naturally from what they had learned about prophecy in the Ancient Near East.
After the sympathy and admiration with which 19th and early 20th century scholars had interested themselves in prophets, Biblical scholarship during the second half of the 20th century shifted away from the poetic (or political) genius perspective and concentrated instead on the texts of prophets, behind which the prophetic proclaimers, the poets, the warners, the human beings, who had once uttered these texts, became nearly invisible.7 The insight in the sometimes centuries long redaction processes of the Biblical prophetic books (like Isaiah and Jeremia) became a strong reason to no longer attempt to understand the true Amos or true Isaiah, but to read the books of the prophets as the products of multiple authors, who were imagined more and more like scholars and editors. The destiny of the prophet Muḥammad in Qur’anic Studies after World War 2 is indeed comparable to that of his Biblical predecessors in the respective field. The neglect of prophetic charisma or physical, communicative, and emotional aspects of the proclamation, and treatment of the Qur’an as a text and text alone had even more dramatic consequences than the redaction-history perspective on Isaiah had, because the “textual turn” of Qur’anic scholarship partly attempted to eliminate the person of the prophet from the history of the Qur’an altogether.8
It is not my intention to reconsider the “crisis” of Qur’anic Studies in its “revisionist” turns,9 but merely to raise the issue of prophetic knowledge from the opposite perspective: Is not the Qur’an quite different from the Biblical prophetic books, precisely because it had a rather minimal redaction history? The original proclamations of the Qur’an seem to be altered so little in its transmission process, that even lexical “mistakes” were not corrected by the first scribal transmitters, like the famous bakka for the city makka in Sūrat Al-Imran (Q3), Verse 96, to name one example.10 In other words, is not the Qur’an, not only due to the Islamic doctrine that Islamic scripture is God’s revelation, but even more so because of its rhetorical and poetic qualities a perfect starting point for an inquiry of prophecy in late antiquity?
2. Different Senses of Prophecy in the Qur’an
In the Qur’an, prophecy is not only the modus of the communicational situation (Muḥammad and his audiences), but the Qur’an interprets protagonists from Israelite history as prophets, who were not prophets in the Bible. In the Qur’anic transformation of the Biblical figures of Abraham, Moses or David and others into prophets, some scholars even saw the backbone of a Qur’anic historiography and salvation history11 and deduced from it that God’s repeated communication with pious individuals throughout human history formed a prophetic genealogy that Muḥammad himself superseded.12 Human knowledge of God and man’s hopes for wellbeing and salvation are formulated on the basis of the experience of a repeated descent of God’s word, that each prophet in his time communicated to his, usually unbelieving, contemporaries.
It is not my intention to discuss here, whether or not Muḥammad’s relation to the preceding prophets may be understood in terms of supersessionism, but, on the contrary, I want to argue that the prophets of the Qur’an cannot be adequately described with one single theology of prophetology, but instead, on a closer look, the different prophetic agents of Qur’anic memory reflect different concepts attributed to holy men, messengers, lawgivers, pious statesmen or sages in late antique religious landscapes. This diversity in the Qur’anic prophetology has, I believe, to do with the long legacy of the introduced prophetic figures. They each bring with them not only Biblical discourse and memory, but also the diversity of late antique interpretations, contemplations and artistic recreations of scripture. I will approach one of the Qur’anic prophets with a Biblical and late antique heritage, the prophet Joseph, who is, in my impression, the most obvious exponent of a different sense of prophecy than the one Nöldeke and others described. Joseph seems to be a paradigmatic example of an understanding of prophetic knowledge that cannot be fully explained in terms of transmitting a divine message, or a religious-political function of proclaiming the truth of monotheism, but Joseph introduces another epistemic category into the Qur’anic discourse, that I will heuristically call ‘wisdom’.
3. Joseph in the Qur’an
It was often argued that Joseph had a particularly close connection to Muḥammad.13 The late Meccan Sūrah dedicated to Joseph (Q 12), tells the story of an enduring believer, who preaches monotheism in the hour of his greatest despair, in the Egyptian prison. Although here we may see a parallel to Muḥammad’s critical task in Mecca,14 it is actually not Joseph, but Moses, who exemplifies the prophet with a political responsibility comparable to that of Muḥammad’s before the Hijra.15 It is merely in later Islamic tradition that the parallel between Muḥammad and Joseph becomes apparent and important. And here it is neither political endurance nor ecstatic experience of the divine, but an overwhelming and nearly metaphysical beauty of Joseph’s body. Joseph’s body seems to be the medium of his authentic truth claim and proof of his prophethood, as early as in the Sīra, where Muḥammad encounters Joseph on his ascension (Miʿrāj), and recognizes him by the overwhelming beauty of his face compared to the moon.16
Sūrat Yūsuf already anticipates this connection of Joseph with physical beauty in two narrative details: The women in the house of “Potiphar” spontaneously cut themselves in the hands at the appearance of Joseph and utter the telling phrase: “This is not a man, but a glorious angel.” (Q 12,31) The second instance concerns the relationship between Joseph and Jacob, which involves a – Qur’anically atypical – healing story with a piece of clothing (Q 12, 84 and 90ff). In both narrative details, the effect of the prophet’s physical appearance (and fragrance) on other protagonists is a positive attribute of his persona that seems to render Joseph “more than a man”.17
After a word on Joseph’s connection with wisdom in Biblical and post-Biblical traditions, I will concentrate on these physical aspects of Joseph’s prophecy and some literary specificities in Sūrah 12 and then give a very brief outlook on this parallel of Muḥammad’s and Joseph’s beauty in Islamic literature.
4. Joseph’s Connection with Wisdom
The Biblical Joseph story (Gen. 37–50) is, in parts, probably older than the book of Genesis, for it integrates storylines from Ancient Eastern Literatures like the Egyptian Tale of the Two Brothers, Sinuhe, and, possibly, even Gilgamesh.18 The story about Jacob’s second-youngest son, who is sold to Egypt by his brothers out of envy, where he manages to rise in the household of the noble man Potiphar, ends up in prison because of his master’s wife’s accusation and then rises to second man of the state via his ability to interpret dreams, continues to be read and retold, rewritten and interpreted throughout the different religious communities of late antiquity. The Joseph story inspired literary innovations like the “first novel of antiquity”, the Hellenistic romance Joseph and Asenath.19 Joseph is remembered in poems and hymns, fantasized about in narratives, and pictured in religious art, for example in the Dura Europos synagogue.20 While the New Testament pays peculiarly little attention to Joseph,21 he again figures prominently in rabbinic and Islamic literature, not only in the Qur’an, but later in Persian mystic novels, like Jami’s Yūsuf and Zulaikha, in various historical and exegetical traditions that creatively combine aspects of the Qur’anic and the Biblical Joseph.22
Gerhard von Rad formulated the influential thesis that the Genesis Joseph story was a “wisdom novella” that had its Sitz im Leben in Solomon’s court, where Joseph served as a model for the moral education of young administrators.23 The Ancient Near Eastern concept of wisdom is elaborated in the Bible in the book of Proverbs (Hebr. Meshalīm) in teachings transmitted from father to son/teacher to student. James Kugel describes the epistemic concept of Biblical wisdom followingly:
We tend to think of knowledge as an ever-growing body of information: each day, scientists discover new things about the universe and about ourselves. But to a denizen of the ancient world, knowledge was a fixed, utterly static set of facts, the unchanging rules that underlie all of reality as we know it. Those rules had been established since the world had been created; indeed, when the Bible asserts that God had created the world ‘with wisdom’ (Prov. 3:19; Ps. 92:6–7; 104:24), what it means is that He had established it according to certain immutable patterns. Possessing wisdom thus meant knowing those rules, not only the rules that governed the natural world (…) but the rules that governed the way people, both the righteous and the wicked, behaved and the way God treated them in consequence. God had created these rules and immutable patterns, but He did not publicize them; on the contrary, they often lay hidden beneath the surface of things. It was the job of sages to try to discover them and to pass their findings on to later generations.24
Scholarship, however, today disagrees on the question, whether the Genesis Joseph story has an original connection with Biblical wisdom. Von Rad saw in Joseph a representative of the young sage, because he interprets dreams, becomes the adviser of a king and – most importantly – wisely accepts his tough destiny, by turning anger and envy to forgiveness and peace. The strongest case for this view lies in the final chapters of Genesis, where Joseph comforts his grieving and anxious brothers with the words: “Do not be distressed or angry with yourselves because you sold me here; for it was God who sent me here ahead of you in order to keep (people) alive … You planned to do me harm, but God had planned it for the good.”(Gen. 44:5; 50:20) This summary in the end of the Biblical story seems to reflect an awareness of the curious fact that stunned also scholars in modern times:25 The absence of God as the protagonist in Gen. 37–50 that also von Rad underlined and interpreted as a specifically modern theology in the Joseph story.26 Unlike his brothers, who struggle with their guilt, the wise Joseph realizes the indirect ways of God’s revelation in human history and understands that his expulsion to Egypt really was not cruelty and abandonment, but a divine “” for the assurance of survival of the family and people. Von Rad’s thesis was, however, contested by younger scholars, like Michael Fox.
Joseph, von Rad argues, displays the virtues taught in Proverbs: He avoids the strange woman (cf. Prov. 7 and elsewhere); he is ‘cool of spirit’ and slow to anger (cf. Prov. 14:29); he restrains his lips (cf. Prov. 17:28); he keeps silence and conceals his knowledge (cf. Prov. 10:19; 12;23); he controls his spirit (cf. Prov. 14:30); he refuses to seek revenge (cf. Prov. 24:29); he is humble (cf. Prov. 15:33; 18:12; 22:4); and, above all, he fears God (cf. Prov. 1:7; 9:10). This is a good description of the ideal man projected by Proverbs. It largely fits Joseph – as it would any wise person – though we must note that Joseph’s upbringing was terrible and he was neither ‘well-bred’ nor ‘finely educated’.27
After all, Joseph, lacking any positive teacher-student relationship, could not represent the Biblical sage. According to Fox, the discrepancies between Joseph and the wisdom student, the addressee of Proverbs, are too evident to claim Gen. 37–50 a sapiential genre. Dream interpretation is not even a positive quality in Biblical wisdom, but instead, several Biblical texts even see it negatively. Joseph in Genesis is, if anything, “wise in Egyptian terms”.28 The most important difference between Joseph and the sage of Proverbs is, however, literary: Joseph at no point utters meshalīm, apophthegmata, or gnomic verses, that are characteristic for the Biblical wisdom genre.
While the connection between Joseph and wisdom stays unresolved in Genesis, it becomes apparent with other Biblical accounts and in late antique retellings of the story. See for example Ps. 105, 16–22:
When he summoned a famine on the land and broke all supply of bread, he had sent a man ahead of them, Joseph, who was sold as a slave. His feet were hurt with fetters; his neck was put in a collar of iron; until what he had said came to pass, the word of the Lord tested him. The king sent and released him; the ruler of the peoples set him free; he made him lord of his house and ruler of all his possessions, to bind his princes at his pleasure and to teach his elders wisdom.
The psalm overdramatizes Joseph’s physical sufferings, mentions details like the collar of iron that do not appear in Genesis. And here, the sapiential thrust of the retelling is outspoken: Joseph not only anticipates God’s plan behind his personal history to be a test, but he becomes a teacher of wisdom to the (Egyptian) elders. In another apocryphal text, the Wisdom of Solomon (Sapientia Salomonis), Joseph is one of the men, who were guided by the personified agent of wisdom, a feminine figure that, again, Proverbs had introduced.29
When the righteous was sold, she forsook him not, but delivered him from sin: she went down with him into the pit,
And left him not in bonds, till she brought him the scepter of the kingdom, and power against those that oppressed him: as for them that had accused him, she shewed them to be liars, and gave him perpetual glory. (SapSal 10, 13–14)
Joseph, here, does not figure as a wise student, son, or teacher, but his life appears under the guidance of lady wisdom. He is not mentioned by name but is already characterized with the title “the righteous” (ha-zadik) that will become the honorary title for Joseph in later Jewish tradition.
Obviously, the arguments for Joseph’s connection with wisdom changed throughout the Biblical or inter-Biblical – does the author mean the scholarly term ‘intertestamental’? because this is a legitimate term, while “innerbiblical” is not. rewritings of his story. Rabbinic authors, later, were also convinced that wisdom was a driving force and active power in the life of Joseph, but they argued differently. It was Joseph being Jacob’s ben zekunim, “son of old age” (Gen. 37:3) that associated Joseph with wisdom in Midrash.30
Christian readers of Genesis, who mainly interpreted Joseph as a typos of Christ, again highlighted Joseph’s (voluntary) endurance of betrayal and pain,31 his forgiving behavior with his brothers, the transformations of his body, represented in the triple change of clothing, and the ascent from prisoner to ruler. A sapiential element is highlighted primarily with regard to Joseph’s resistance to the seductions of Potiphar’s wife. In the Testament of Joseph, the woman is pictured as an evil force with even satanic connotations. Joseph here is capable of resisting her offers and pressures because he is obedient to the law.32 Already the book of Jubilees adds the information that Joseph remembered the law of Abraham, from which his father Jacob had regularly read aloud, and therefore knew the divine prohibition of adultery (Jub 39,5–8).33 Similarly, Joseph is pictured as the example of a pious man, who dedicates his life to Tora scholarship in the Yoma tractate of the Babylonian Talmud that – maybe ironically – contrasts the life dedicated to scripture with the temptation caused by Joseph’s physical beauty. Joseph here resists the woman’s offenses with praying psalms, which again manifests a (yet different) connection of Joseph with sapiential virtues.34
To sum up: The Biblical Joseph story has similarities and discrepancies with the virtues attributed to the sage in Proverbs and significantly lacks the literary form of mashal. The different rewritings of the Joseph story in late antiquity highlight his connection with wisdom, using different arguments and picking up different “sapiential” elements of the original narrative. What the late antique sapiential rewritings of Joseph eliminate is the geopolitical importance of Joseph as the father of the tribes Ephraim and Manasse that figures in other Biblical texts,35 but loses significance throughout reception history. It is this conjunction of Joseph with wisdom, achieved through the inner- and especially the post-Biblical rewritings of the biblical Joseph story, the “collapse”36 of the formerly religious-political figure of Joseph into the paradigm of a sage, which fixes the biblically still disputable connection of Joseph with wisdom and earns him the honorary title Joseph ha-zadek and Joseph ha-khakhom.
Such sapientialization of Biblical protagonists that were achieved also for other personas, for example in Philo of Alexandria’s description of Abraham in his De Abrahamo,37 may be counted as one of the “mutations of late antiquity”38 that Guy Stroumsa famously described and to which the various religious communities, Jews, Christians and finally also Muslims contributed together.
4.1 Sapiential Elements in the Qur’anic Joseph Story
In the Qur’an, Biblical wisdom does not figure prominently. The idea of sapiential teachings, transmitted from father to son, occurs only seldom in the figure of Luqmān in the equally late-Meccan Sūrah 31. But in Q 12 one finds multiple indications of its participation in what Kugel described as the epistemic concept of ancient wisdom: The attempt to understand the rules God has inscribed in his creation and pass this understanding on to the next generation.39 The most obvious reflection of such a “wisdom worldview” in Q 12 is the repetition of Joseph’s capacity of “taʾwīl al-aḥadīth” (verses 6, 21, 101), the “understanding of events”40 that may qualify him as “wise” the way he figured in the end of Genesis: Joseph, from the beginning, understands that his destiny unfolds according to a divine plan. Unlike in Genesis, God himself in the Qur’anic Joseph story does not stay silent, but reveals to His prophet Joseph, that he will later triumph over his assailants, already when he sits in the empty pit: “And We inspired him, ‘You will inform them of this deed of theirs when they are unaware.’” (Q 12,15)
Throughout the Sūra, the plot is interwoven with “sapiential” comments from the perspective of the divine storyteller that are directed at the listener of the Sūra, for example in verse 7 “In Joseph and his brothers are signs for those who ask.” (la-qad kāna fī yūsufa wa-ʾikhwatihī ʾāyātun li-s-sāʾilīn), 4: “Satan really is an evident enemy of man” (ʾinna sh-shaiṭāna li-l-ʾinsāni ʿaduwwun mubīnun), 6: “Your Lord is knowing and wise” (ʾinna rabbaka ʿalīmun ḥakīm), 19: “God knows, what they do” (wa-llāhu ʿalīmun bi-mā yaʿmalūn), 21: “God has the supremacy in his matter, but the majority of people don’t know” (wa-llāhu ghālibun ʿalā ʾamrihī wa-lākinna ʾakṯara n-nāsi lā yaʿlamūn), 24: “He (Joseph) is one of our chosen servants” (innahū min ʿibādina l-mukhlaṣīna)41 35: “He (God) is the hearing, the knowing.” (huwa s-samīʿu l-ʿalīm) etc. etc.
Angelika Neuwirth has systematized the different categories of such clauses in the verse endings throughout Q 12.42 They not only structure the Qur’an’s longest coherent narrative formally and acoustically, but cross-connect the performer/storyteller with the listener, and the Joseph story itself with other narratives of the Qur’an, by interweaving lexical and syntactic patterns.
Alle paar Verse (…) tauchen aus dem Redefluß die den Horizont des jeweiligen Themas übersteigenden Schwarz-Weiß-Klauseln auf, und noch wichtiger: die hymnisch gefärbten Gottesprädikationen. Man könnte auch sagen, daß die Sure (im Gegensatz zu vielen anderen) keinen eigenen Hymnenpassus enthält (…), dafür aber die Elemente eines Hymnus als Verschluß-Kora (Klauseln) über den ganzen Erzählteil wie Perlen ausgestreut sind. Einem kontemplativen Hörer mögen diese Gottesprädikationen sogar als das eigentliche Rückgrad der Erzählung erscheinen. So gesehen wird nicht die Erzählung mit Gottes-Epitheta dorchflochten und geschmückt, sondern die verschiedenen preisenswerten Eigenschaften Gottes werden anhand einer Erzählung entfaltet.43
These phrases that are most apparent in the rhyming verse endings occur also in direct speeches of dialogues and interpositions of the divine narrator of the story, these are formally associated with the wisdom phrases of Proverbs, and with the mashal genre. The gnomic genre that was so characteristic of Biblical wisdom but absent in the Genesis Joseph story, here seems to have found its way into the Joseph narrative. The Qur’an hereby renders Joseph “sapiential” in a way he had not been in Genesis. He is not only capable of “understanding the events” of his life but exemplifies the patient, God-fearing young sage, who speaks in meaningful verses. Read together with the “wise” anticipation of the end of the story in its beginning, we may argue: Joseph’s wisdom is a direct result of his relationship with God. He is patient, enduring, God-fearing, and wise because God taught him wisdom. The educational relationship between father and son/teacher and student of Biblical widsom literature is transferred into the relationship between God and prophet.
5. The Prophetic Body as Sapiential Medium
Joseph’s prophecy, in two plot lines of Q 12, manifests itself in the effect of his physical appearance on other protagonists of the story. The women in Egypt, when confronted with Joseph as the object of female desire, spontaneously call out: “This is not a man, this is a glorious angel!” (verse 31) and thereby identify an aesthetic (and erotic) aspect of the prophet Joseph connected with his body.44 Many of the contemporary Jewish texts that add similar narrative expansions about the events in the Egyptian house, where Joseph is a servant, concentrate on the question why and how Joseph could resist the seductions of the “strange woman” of whom the Book of Proverbs so vehemently warns the student of wisdom (see esp. Prov 7).45 In many late antique texts, the episode about the seduction and resistance merely serves as an intermediary step in the personal development of Joseph as a representative of the young man to become a sage. The Qur’an, however, does not concentrate exclusively on his development, but on the contrary, adds the perspective of the women. On the narrative level, the cutting of the hands serves as proof that the Egyptian mistress cannot be blamed for desiring her servant and does not deserve the mockery of society. The fellow women indirectly pardon her, by collectively imitating her “burning” or “violent” desire for Joseph and their act of self-injuring painfully adds significance to their own physicality. Thus, the women of Egypt in Sūrah 12 figure as the opposite of the female persona of lady wisdom, who supports and guides Joseph according to Sapientia Salomonis.
They represent the human response to the nearly superhuman, angelic, male prophet. However, they are not portrayed as evil seductresses, like in the Testament of Joseph.46 The women’s desire for Joseph is not sanctioned in the Qur’an, but, on the opposite, is credited with legitimacy, which is further underlined, when taking the several Jewish traditions into account that tell similar variants of an “assembly of ladies” in the house of Potiphar. Here, the women are also neither sanctioned, nor punished, but instead, form an identity as a female collective on the other side of their (male) object of desire.47 The cutting of the women in their hands at the gaze of Joseph indicates a moment of violence that adds significance also to the body of Joseph.48 Female desire, even if unfulfilled, is a means to acknowledge the overwhelming effect a prophet may have in his physical appearance.
This angelic appearance of Joseph’s body resonates with another detail in the Qur’anic story: Near the end of the Sūra, when Joseph’s brothers have returned from Egypt twice and this time without the youngest brother, the Biblical Benjamin, Jacob is so pained by his grief for Joseph that he loses his eyesight: “He turned his back and said: ‘O my grief over Joseph!’ And his eyes became white/blurry over his sorrow, for he was full of grief.” (84)
It is not until Jacob first smells Joseph and finally touches a garment that Joseph sends to his father that Jacob is cured from this eye-sickness. The sickness and healing of the father in the Sūrah is the eminent motive around which the recognition, reunion and reconciliation between Joseph and his family develops. In Genesis, this reunion is very lengthily reported in four full chapters (Gen. 42–46). The brothers here are sent back and forth, oscillating between Egypt and Canaan on several restless journeys, during which they recapitulate their original guilt and lose their identity as a male collective.49 Sūrah 12 does not pick up the dramatic development of the Biblical narrative with the climax of Joseph’s tearful self-revelation to his brothers (Gen. 45:3: “I am Joseph. Is my father still alive?”), but instead gives a short summary, again spiked with sapiential, gnomic commentary:
They said, ‘Are you indeed Joseph?’ He said ‘I am Joseph, and this is my brother. God has certainly favored us. Indeed, he who fears God and is patient, then indeed, God does not allow to be lost the reward of those who do good. Take this, my shirt, and cast it over the face of my father; he will become seeing. And bring me your family, all together.’
And when the caravan departed, their father said, ‘Indeed, I find the smell of Joseph, if you did not think me weakened in mind.’
They said, ‘By God, indeed you are in your [same] old error.’
And when the bearer of good tidings arrived, he cast it over his face, and he returned [once again] seeing. He said, ‘Did I not tell you that I know from God that which you do not know?’
They said, ‘O our father, ask for us forgiveness of our sins; indeed, we have been sinners.’ (12,90–97)
Israel Shapiro suggested a midrashic context to the episode of Jacob’s blindness, pointing at a midrash that claims that the “holy spirit” left Jacob, after Joseph was sold to Egypt.50 Others instead associated the blurring of Jacobs eye with the slightly later event in Genesis 48 during his adoption of Ephraim and Manasse.51 One may also draw the connection to Isaac’s blurry eyes that led him to confuse his younger son for the elder in Gen. 25. There is, of course, evidence for Jacob expressing a straightforward death wish in Gen. 37:34 after the brothers show him Joseph’s torn garment. In Genesis, Jacob’s spirit (ruach) is revived only after he sees the wagons with silver, grain, and festive garments that Joseph sends (Gen. 45:27).52 Thus Genesis itself clearly emphasizes the deep, even existential impact of Joseph’s destiny on his father Jacob. But neither Genesis, nor any Midrash mention this relation to eyesight.
Instead, it is the church father Origen, who mentions Jacob’s blindness in his interpretation of Joseph being a typos of Christ. Origen argues that Jacob lost his eyesight, when his sons showed him the blood-drenched garment as a proof that Joseph was killed by a wild beast and regained sight when Joseph lay his hands on the eyes of his father in Egypt. Here Origen draws a parallel to Jesus’ healing of the blind born youth in the Gospel in John 9, 1–12.53 Very similar to Origen’s interpretation are the Syriac texts Joseph Witztum collects that also relate Jacob’s grief over the loss of Joseph at the beginning of the story with an effect on the father’s eyes. Pseudo-Basilius, Witztum shows, reports that “the light of his eyes dimmed”,54 when Jacob faced the bloody garment. Since Benjamin and Joseph are frequently called the “light of their father’s eyes” in other Syriac Texts55 the comparison between blindness and the loss of the beloved sons here is clearly metaphorical. Highlighting this “figurative” significance of Jacob’s blindness and the healing accomplished by Joseph’s touch (or garment), Charbel Rizk in a dissertation on Joseph in the Qur’an and Syriac tradition argues that the Qur’anic story is reminiscent of contemporary Syriac liturgies of the Eucharist.56 Channeled through the strong typological connection of Joseph and Jesus in many Syriac homilies, the healing story at the end of Sūrah 12 may also open a typological reading of the Qur’anic Joseph. Rizk argues that already in its earlier occurrence, the shirt (qamīṣ) of Joseph is indirectly linked with Jesus. The shirt proves Joseph’s innocence against the Egyptian woman and therefore vindicates the oppressed, like Jesus does, not only in the synoptic Gospels, but also in the Qur’an, where he vindicates “his mother Mary against [the] accusation of sexual immorality”57 in Q 19. Similarly, Joseph’s shirt at the end of Sūrah 12 not only heals a physical eye sickness, but also, and maybe primarily, gives Jacob reassurance in his faith in God, which is, on the narrative level, connected with his faith in Joseph’s survival.
Rizk relates the report of this physical and spiritual recovery in the Joseph story of the Qur’an to the Syriac liturgies of the Eucharist on the basis of two arguments: As already attested in the story of the disciples in Emmaus (Luke 24), the community shared in the Eucharist may have an “eye-opening” effect that is performatively reflected also in certain Eucharist liturgy practices, when believers first place the Eucharistic bread on their eyes before eating it.58 The second argument concerns the fragrance of Joseph (rīḥ) that Jacob “magically” senses from afar (Q 12, 94). Here, Rizk points to practices connected with the use of incense in the Eucharistic liturgy that also symbolically link the presence of Christ with fragrance (Syriac rīḥa).
Syriac traditions are a more plausible transmission link to the Qur’anic proclamation in Mecca than the western church father Origen is, although direct contact with communities of the Syriac Churches during the Meccan proclamations is also disputable. But, as Zishan Ghaffar, who highlights the hermeneutical importance of typology for Qur’anic prophetology, argues: “Even without a closer contact to Christian communities it can be presumed that such typological interpretations had been circulating in the Late Antique period, so that it was only logical for the proclaimer of the Qur’an to make use of this technique and to reformat it.”59 Typology certainly is a key hermeneutical strategy to the different late antique communities, especially, but not exclusively to Christians. Rizk shows how in the Qur’anic Joseph story is in conversation with theologies and literary motives in the Syriac traditions, especially with typological readings. In so far as both Jesus and Joseph share in the Qur’an certain characteristics, primarily the capacity to heal the blind (Q 3, 49 and 5, 110), vindicate the oppressed and reassure faith, one has reason to argue that the Qur’an reflects the analogy of Joseph and Jesus in the typological readings of neighboring traditions, without suggesting a Christological “supersessionist” or exclusivist significance of Joseph. Rather such typological readings of Joseph as typos of Christ add to the theological uniqueness of the prophet Joseph in the Qur’an.
Other Liturgical Contexts
As already mentioned with Rizk’s interpretation of the healing story in the Qur’anic Joseph story in light of Syriac Eucharist liturgies, Sura 12, like the middle and late-Meccan Suras in general, has a strong liturgical component. The liturgical Sitz im Leben of the Sura and its structural, lexical, and performative similarities with Syriac homilies is one of Rizk’s strongest arguments for a connection between the religious and hermeneutical practices of the Syriac Churches and those of the prophetic community in Mecca. But the Syriac Eucharist Liturgy is not the only possible religious praxis to be taken into consideration for an understanding of Joseph’s prophecy in the Qur’an. Let us again look at the verses that narrate the reconciliation between Joseph and his brothers. First of all, by directing his brothers back home with his shirt, Joseph proves capable of prophetic knowledge in the simplest understanding of the term. He anticipates Jacob’s loss of eyesight in “Canaan”.60 This may be a neglectable detail, would not the entire narrative episode circle around the proof of earlier uttered predictions. Joseph’s utterance: “He who fears God and is patient, then indeed, God does not allow to be lost the reward of those who do good” (Q 12, 91) sounds like an almost direct quotation from the Biblical Meshalīm. Fear of God and patience are the cardinal virtues of the sage that both the Qur’anic Joseph and Jacob prove capable of.61 Although the brothers already know better, they repeat their accusation to Jacob to be “in his same old error”, maintaining the belief that Joseph is alive. This stubbornness of the brothers despite better knowledge causes a moment of retardation in the storytelling: The brothers repeat their rejection of truth, Jacob finds confirmation for his original belief that Joseph is still alive via the fragrance of the garment. Jacob then insists on possessing knowledge from God that the brothers don’t and finally the brothers admit their sin and plea for forgiveness. This development of the plot suggests a liturgical motive. The antagonism between sinners and sage, who is himself redeemed by the final evidence of his original belief and thereby converts the collective of sinners (the brothers) to repentants might reflect the liturgical Sitz im Leben the Joseph story had in ancient Judaism. According to the Book of Jubilees, this place was in the ceremonies of Yom Kippur that are not exclusively reserved for remembering the Israelite’s sin at Sinai, but also for the atonement of Joseph’s brothers.62
Once we are pointed to the context of Proverbs, we easily find many wisdom utterances that relate to eyesight, for example: “The hearing ear and the seeing eye, the LORD has made them both.” (Prov. 20, 12) One utterance is particularly close to the Josephstory, Prov. 23:26–29:
Give me your heart, my son, and let your eyes delight in my ways.
For a harlot is a deep pit, and an adulterous woman is a narrow well.
Surely she lurks as a robber, and increases the faithless among men.
Who has woe? Who has sorrow? Who has contentions? Who has complaining? Who has wounds without cause? Who has dullness of eyes?
Unlike the majority of meshalīm, this one stresses the crucial importance of the son for the spiritual wellbeing of the father, not the other way around. Not only does the deep pit, the narrow well and the adulterous woman anticipate motives from the Joseph story, but the final lamentation: “Who has woe? Who has sorrow? Who has wounds without cause? Who has dull eyes?” may well be read as a summary of Jacob’s mental state as head of the most “dysfunctional family” of scriptural tradition, including his inability to see clearly. Reading the Sūrah also through the heuristic of wisdom literature further stresses another component:
The motive of blurred and eased eyesight primarily concerns the relationship between father and son, which is further highlighted in other verses of the Sura, like in the divine announcement to Joseph: “God will complete his favor on you like he did on Abraham and Isaac” (Q 12, 6). Joseph himself asserts this connection in his prison sermon: “I have followed the belief of my fathers Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.” (Q 12, 38) Although the apparent argument here is monotheism and the prohibition of idol-worship, the Sūrah also associates the ʿAqīda, which brings into play yet another example of a reciprocal redemption of father and son, a consolidation of the great father Abraham with God via the pious and courageous admission to self-sacrifice by the son.
Taking these father-son relationships throughout the Sura into consideration, it is worth pointing out that the healing of Joseph’s father’s blindness, different from the Syriac reports on the matter, is accomplished not by the touch of Joseph’s hands or body, but the touch of his garment. This is a significant difference to Jesus’ healing of the blind in John 9 that Origen and the Syriac Church fathers allude to. Several scholars emphasized the symmetrical structure of the Joseph Sūra, highlighted it as ring-composition or chiastic structure, for which the occurrence of the qamīṣ of Joseph is an example.63 The qamīṣ, the shirt of Joseph that effects Jacob’s eyes, evokes the qamīṣ that was shown to Jacob at the beginning of the story, after the brother’s original crime.64 What is missing in the Qur’an (and many Syriac texts with similar symmetrical structures) is the origin of Joseph’s shirt that, in Genesis, is so clearly connected with Jacob favoring Joseph over his other children. “Israel loved Joseph most and he made for him an ornamented tunic” (Gen. 37:3) is the starting point for the Joseph story in Genesis that already associates tragedy. The Qur’an skips this part and introduces the “shirt” (qamīṣ) only when it comes to the brother’s attempt to trick Jacob of Joseph’s death. (Q 12,18) Since Witztum, the Syriac tradition specialist, himself concludes that the similarities between the Syriac texts and the Qur’anic story are best explained by their shared departure from the Biblical version,65 we have no reason not to emphasize the “missing” parts of Genesis in Sūrah 12. By omitting Jacob’s contribution to the escalation of envy among the brothers (by making only for Joseph a multicolored garment and loving him more), Sūrah 12 renders the clothing of the prophet a purely positive artifact. It serves as a proof of his innocence (33) and an artifact of faith that mediates between Egypt and Canaan, Joseph and Jacob, climaxing in the healing of Jacob’s blindness. The shirt that heals Jacob’s blindness is not a magic tool, but a vehicle of faith.
Thus, in its unique retelling and structure of the Joseph story, Sūrah 12 brings several scriptural elements and interpretive traditions, several typological cross-references together: the repentance of the sinners, the fulfillment of the divine plan, the inversion of the ordinary sapiential relationship by a teaching of the son to his father, the relief from blurred sight via touch with the prophetic clothing. These different references certainly do not culminate in a Christological argument, but the Sūrah rather opens a multiple typological connection of Joseph, Jacob, and the brothers to other protagonists of history.
The question we should raise is not only how far the prophet of the Qur’an and his community might have been aware of the homiletic texts and practices from the neighboring Christian communities but merely, which purposes the intertextual and performative contexts of the Eucharist and other liturgical traditions serve for the Qur’anic community and text. It seems to me that the physical aspects of the prophet Joseph, the detail of the healing qualities of his fragrance and garment highlight the interdependency of spiritual and physical wellbeing. Joseph, seen in the light of the referred traditions, seems to introduce the experience that divine knowledge is not perceived on a linguistic level alone, but it has a sensual, aesthetic, haptic, and emotional component that goes beyond the cognitive understanding and verbally claimed truth of monotheism.
Conclusion
Many late antique traditions, including the Qur’anic narrative, that elaborate on Joseph’s physical beauty are still surpassed by the later Islamic descriptions. And precisely in these descriptions of Joseph’s beauty Islamic interpreters and storytellers draw the connection between Joseph and Muḥammad. Al-Thaʿlabī describes Joseph’s physical appearance on the authority of Kaʿb al-Akhbār in the following words:
Josef was light skinned. He had a beautiful face, curly hair and large eyes. He was a medium build, his arms and legs were muscular, his stomach ‘hungry’ or flat. He had a hooked nose, and a small navel. The black mole on his right cheek was an ornament to his face, and between his eyes there was a spot white as the full moon. His eyelashes were like the feathers of an eagle, and when he smiled the light flashed from his teeth. When Josef spoke rays of light beamed from between his lips. No one can fully describe Joseph.66
Al-Thaʿlabī’s description of Joseph is only one in many that compare Joseph’s face to light, and, sometimes more precisely, to the moon, to which Muḥammad himself is often compared as early as in the 9th century Shamāʾil Muḥammadiya by the mystic al-Ḥakīm al-Tirmidhī and many times in the later philosophical and literary traditions.
I give one example of a description of Muḥammad’s beauty that is especially similar to the one we heard from al-Thaʿlabī. Abū Huraira when asked about the qualities of the prophet, said:
He had the best of qualities. He was medium in size, broad-shouldered. He had a high forehead and thick black hair, black eyes, long eyelashes, he treaded with his entire foot that had no curvature and when he spread his mantle around his shoulders it was as a bullion of silver. And when he laughed, light shone from the walls.67
The comparison of the prophet to the moon was so powerful that it inspired an artistic genre, the hiliyāt that were brought to perfection in the 17th century by Hafiz Osman. Here, the outer and inner qualities of the prophet are entered into the perfect oval of the moon. The linguistic description of the prophet’s body and character replaces the prophetic physical portrait. The hilya, like the shirt of Joseph, and like the sandal and footprints of the prophet that are venerated throughout the Islamic world as sources of prophetic blessings,68 is a representation of the prophetic body that reveals itself only in its withdrawal, that is effective only in its trace.
I want to conclude with a hermeneutical reflection on this aspect of prophet Joseph in connection with wisdom: If we understand the allegory of lady wisdom as divine actress in the life of Joseph (as introduced in Prov. 1–9 and specifically connected with Joseph in SapSal 10) literally, we may describe the transmission process of stories itself as her accomplishment. The different Joseph traditions are a rewriting accomplished with wisdom. They are at the same time a new mediation and actualization of the efficacy of wisdom as the earthly agent of God. In her oscillation between the indispensability of revelatory knowledge and the corporate, playful, and even erotic efficacy, lady wisdom highlights the dialectic between the deprivation of divine knowledge and the joy of fabulating that shapes the transformations of the Joseph story through the centuries. As a patron of the (always imperfect) transmission processes and never completed interpretation, lady wisdom is both subject and object of her transcription. A by-effect of her agency is that she disguises the religious affiliation of the texts to either or another community of belief.
I want to thank Dr. (des) Charbel Rizk for his thoughtful response to my paper as it was presented during the conference “Theology of Prophetology in Dialogue” in Paderborn in August 2021 and for letting me read his inspiring dissertation, to which I will refer later in this article, on Joseph in the Qur’an and Syriac Tradition. Dr. Rizk’s criticism and input have helped me rethink and reformulate my own ideas and readings of the Qur’anic Joseph and deepened my understanding of the crucial importance of liturgical contexts of the Qur’anic Joseph story vis-à-vis Syriac literature. Here I depend on translations and interpretations from colleagues specialized in Syriac literature, like Charbel Rizk.
Nöldeke et al., The History of the Qur’ān, 1.
Ibid.
For Nöldekes image of the prophet see for example Sinai, “Orientalism, Authorship, and the Onset of Revelation,” 145–54.
Cited in Cooper, “Imagining Prophecy,” 27.
Ibid.
See for example Schmid, “How the Prophets Became Biblical Authors and How the Biblical Authors Became Prophets.”
Wansbrough, Quranic Studies; Crone and Cook, Hagarism and others.
This was done thoroughly by Angelika Neuwirth in several publications. See for example Neuwirth, “Vom Rezitationstext über die Liturgie zum Kanon.”
Discussed in Sinai, Der Koran, 24; (with further examples). See also the similar argument by Zishan Ghaffar in context of the development of Qur’anic notions of prophecy in Ghaffar, “Einordnung in die koranische Prophetologie,” 190.
See Griffith, The Bible in Arabic, 62ff; Stroumsa, The Making of the Abrahamic Religions in Late Antiquity, 59–87.
Bobzin, “The ‘Seal’ of the Prophets”; Stroumsa, The Making of the Abrahamic Religions in Late Antiquity, 87ff.
See among others Prémare, Joseph et Muhammad.
As is convincingly argued in Saleh, “End of Hope”; Qureshi, “Ring Composition in Sūrat Yūsuf”; Spitaler, Diem, and Wild, “Zur Struktur der Yūsuf-Sure,” 123–52.
See for example Neuwirth, Der Koran als Text der Spätantike, 653–70. And her interpretations on Moses in many other publications.
Ibn-Isḥāq, Das Leben des Propheten, 87.
For an inspiring analysis and comparison with Jewish arguments about Joseph’s masculinity see: Lefkovitz, “Not a Man,” 155–80.
See Goldman, The Wiles of Women, the Wiles of Men, 44, 57–78. On the parallel between Joseph and Sinuhe: Meinhold, “Die Geschichte des Sinuhe und die alttestamentliche Diasporanovelle.” On the question of Egyptian influence on Genesis 37–50 see Schipper, “The Egyptian Background of the Joseph Story,” 6–23.
For a new translation of the text see Josef und Asenath, Ein Roman über richtiges und falsches Handeln, trans. Holder.
See the chapter by Catherine Hezser in this volume, who discusses the paintings in this synagogue more extensively.
Joseph is mentioned in John 4:5, Acts 7: 9–16 and Heb. 11, 21–22.
For an overview (although without Christian contexts) see next to the aforementioned literature, Bernstein, Stories of Joseph.
Rad, “Die Josephsgeschichte und ältere Chokma,” 120–27, for alternative dating see the more recent scholarship of Michael V. Fox (cited further down).
Kugel, How to Read the Bible, 506.
Esp. ibid.
Already church fathers and rabbis felt this “indirect report of God”, when they speculated about God’s presence in the nameless man (ʾīsh) that Joseph finds on his way to his brothers in the fields of Sichem. For examples see Levenson, Joseph, 12ff. Already church fathers and rabbis felt this “indirect report of God”, when they speculated about God’s presence in the nameless man (ʾīsh) that Joseph finds on his way to his brothers in the fields of Sichem. For examples see Levenson, Joseph, 12ff. For further analysis of the theology of the Joseph story see the standard German commentary of Ebach, Gen 37–50, 40, 116–172, 660–63 and the article by Christina Nießen, “Der Verborgene Handlungsträger,” 32–358.
Fox, “Joseph and Wisdom,” 231–61, here 256.
Fox, “Joseph and Wisdom,” 247.
See Prov. 1–9, esp. Prov. 8, 22–36. For an interpretation on the basis of gender see Yoder, “Personified Wisdom and Feminist Theologies.”
Levenson, Joseph, 7.
See Acts 7, 10.
Testament of Joseph, 3:1–3; 9:1–2,5: “How often did the Egyptian woman threaten me with death! How often did she give me over to punishment, and then call me back and threaten me, and when I was unwilling to lie with her, she said to me: You will be my master, and (master) of everything that is in my house, if you will give yourself to me.” (Translation in Kugel, In Potiphar’s House, 53).
“Joseph aber war schön von Angesicht; gar hübsch war sein Antlitz, und so hob das Weib seines Herrn ihre Augen auf, sah Joseph und gewann ihn lieb; dann bat sie ihn, dass er ihr beiwohnen möge. Er aber gab sich nicht hin, sondern dachte an den Herrn und an die Worte, die sein Vater Jakob aus den Geschichten Abrahams zu lesen pflegte, dass kein Mensch mit einem verheirateten Weib Unzucht treiben dürfe und dass für einen solchen die Todesstrafe im Himmel vor dem höchsten Gott festgesetzt und dass die Sünde zu seinen Ungunsten in den ewigen Büchern vor dem Herrn stets aufgezeichnet werde.” (Translation: Paul Rießler, Altjüdisches Schrifttum außerhalb der Bibel, Augsburg 1926, 643). It is good to refer to a German work of scholarship in a footnote and quote it, but I see no reason for presenting such a long text in an English publication when the Book of Jubilees itself is available in English in all good libraries, and some versions are even free online.
Yoma 35b: “Man erzählt vom frommen Joseph, daß die Frau Potiphars tagtäglich ihn durch Worte zu verführen suchte; Gewänder, die sie seinetwegen morgens anlegte, legte sie abends nicht an, Gewänder, die sie seinetwegen abends anlegte, legte sie morgens nicht an. Sie sprach zu ihm: ‘Sei mir zuwillen.’ Er erwiderte ihr: ‘Nein.’ Sie sprach zu ihm: ‘Ich sperre dich ins Gefängnis.’ Er erwiderte ihr: ‘Der Herr befreit die Gefangenen.’ (Sie:) ‘Ich beuge deine Statur.’ (Er:) ‘Der Herr richtet die Gebeugten auf.’ ‘Ich blende dir die Augen.’ ‘Der Herr macht die Blinden sehend.’ Alsdann gab sie ihm tausend Silbertalente, damit er ihr zuwillen sei, mit ihr zu schlafen, mit ihr zusammen zu sein; er aber wollte ihr nicht zuwillen sein. Mit ihr zu schlafen, dieser Welt; mit ihr zusammen zu sein, in jener Welt.” (Translation: Lazarus Goldschmidt, Der babylonische Talmud, Berlin 1930, vol. 3, 93 f.)
Texts mentioning the “house of Joseph” and the tribe Joseph see Lux, Josefsgeschichte, 1f.
Kugel, In Potiphar’s House, 26.
On the strategy of a “sapientialization” of Abraham in Philo’s work and other early Jewish and Christian texts see Becker, “Bios und Sophia.”
Stroumsa, Das Ende des Opferkults.
Kugel, How to Read the Bible, 506.
For alternative translations of the term see Tropper, “Josephs Gabe der Rätseldeutung (Ta’wīlu l-’ Aḥādīṯi) im Koran.”
See also the Qur’anic verses 15,39f; 38,82; 37,40.74.128.160; 37,169; 19,51; 38,45–47, where the same wording is used to describe other prophets and thereby acoustically (and semantically) connect the Joseph story with other proclamations. On the development of the notion ʾibād see also Ghaffar, “Einordnung in die koranische Prophetologie,” 190f.
Spitaler, Diem, and Wild, “Zur Struktur der Yūsuf-Sure.”
Ibid, 151.
For an interpretation of the episode on the basis of gender see Lefkovitz, “Not a Man.”
The identification of Joseph as an “angel” also has a connection in the polemic against Muhammad to be an angel. This polemic, however, has the primary aim to discredit the authority of the prophet by questioning the source of his inspiration. Since the issue in Q 12 is not Joseph’s prophetic message, but a reaction to his physical appearance, I do not stress this parallel further in my argument.
For examples see Bar-Ilan, “Sūrat Yūsuf (XII) and Some of Its Possible Jewish Sources,” 189–210; Bernstein, Stories of Joseph; Kugel, In Potiphar’s House.
For the text see FN 31 above.
Particularly Midrash ha-Gadol, where Lady Potiphar asks all the other women to claim that Joseph had touched them in order to strengthen her cause against her husband, who would, otherwise, not believe her.
On speculations over the erotic overpowering of the women with intertexts in Midrash see Bar-Ilan, “Sūrat Yūsuf (XII) and Some of Its Possible Jewish Sources.” On further intertextual relations of the episode see also Kugel, In Potiphar’s House, and Bernstein, Stories of Joseph. See also the interpretation of Mustansir Mir of the cutting of the hands as an indication of irony: Mir, “Irony in the Qurʾān,” 173–87, here: 179.
For a longer interpretation see Schmidt, Josef, 93–105.
Schapiro, Die Haggadischen Elemente im erzählenden Teil des Korans, 72–75.
Abraham Geiger quoted in Witztum, “Joseph among the Ishmaelites,” 435.
The verse specifically says that Jacob’s heart stayed cold, because he did not believe the news reported by his sons that Joseph was alive. Only the arrival of the wagons revives his spirit. On a comparison between the qamīṣ in Q 12 and the garments in Gen. 45 see Witztum, “Joseph among the Ishmaelites,” 434f.
Referred to in Lux, “Josef / Josefsgeschichte.”
See Witztum, “Joseph among the Ishmaelites,” 436.
Witztum refers to Balai, Ephraem Graecus and Romanos. See ibid.
Rizk, Prophetology, Typology, and Christology.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ghaffar, “Einordnung in die koranische Prophetologie,” 196.
The geographical places in the Joseph story of the Qur’an stay unnamed, like all protagonists of the story except Joseph and Jacob. The story thereby neglects (or avoids) the political meaning the Josephstory has in the end of the book of Genesis and before the Exodus. See also the similar argument of Ghaffar, “Einordnung in die koranische Prophetologie,” 213.
Comp. for example Prov. 1,29; 2,5; 3,7; 8,13; 10,27; 14,2.26.27; 15,16.33; 16,6; 19,23; 22,4; 23,17; 24,21; 28,14; 29,25; 31,30.
Jub 37, referred to in Lux, Josef, 271.
See Cuypers, “Structures Rhétoriques Dans Le Coran”, and now, Qureshi, “Ring Composition.”
See also Witztum, “Joseph among the Ishmaelites,” 437.
Ibid.
Goldman, The Wiles of Women, the Wiles of Men, 83.
Ammann, Vorbild und Vernunft, 58.
On such “relics” see Beihiery, “Hilya,” 258–63.