The Bible in Arabic: The Scriptures of the 'People of the Book' in the Language of Islam.

• Author: McCollum, Adam Carter
• Position: Book review

The Bible in Arabic: The Scriptures of the "People of the Book" in the Language of Islam. By SIDNEY H. Griffith. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013. Pp. xiii + 255. $29.95.

Several of Sidney Griffith's articles are standard reading for anyone wishing to get an idea of the texts and history of Christianity in Arabic-speaking environments; The Bible in Arabic will likewise be standard introductory reading for what was and is known of the title's subject. Across seven chapters Griffith surveys the Bible in pre-Islamic Arabia, the Bible in (and not in) the Quran, the earliest translations of the Bible into Arabic, later Christian and Jewish biblical translations into Arabic, the interest of Islamic scholars toward the Bible, and, finally, the later history of the Bible in Arabic, including the work of European scholars and missionaries on Arabic Bible translations.

It is worth stressing first how well chosen the title of the book is: "The Bible in Arabic," not "The Arabic Bible." There really is no single, even relatively widely accepted Bible in the fullest sense across the groups that have had the need or wish to read or recite the Bible in Arabic. There is not an Arabic Bible, but parts of Arabic Bibles in different versions translated from different source-texts.

The goals of the book are "to call attention to the central role the Bible and biblical lore have played in the unfolding of religious thought in Arabic in Islamic times, from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages" and "to highlight the interreligious dimension of intellectual life in the Arabic-speaking world in the same period" (p. xi), and again, "to call attention to the story of how the Bible came into Arabic at the hands of Jews and Christians, and how it fared among Muslims" (p. xiii). The introduction begins with the just evaluation that "[t]he study of the Bible in Arabic is in its infancy" (p. 1). While there have been a number of text editions and studies of specific issues, this is the first general introduction "with a synoptic view of the role of the translations in the three main communities" (p. 2), that is, among Jews, Christians, and Muslims. The subject is thus "a neglected area of biblical studies and ... an equally neglected phase of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim interreligious history" (p. 5).

All interested in the Quran and the earliest interactions between Muslims and the Jews and Christians of Arabia will find the first chapter (pp. 7-53) of particular relevance. Here Griffith traces the quranic witness to those communities. To the question, "Was there a (written) pre-Islamic Arabic Bible?" Griffith answers, "No"--there is simply no evidence for that. Scholars who have answered the question affirmatively, Griffith says, must depend on a series of extrapolations to conclude thus. Our evidence for "the earliest written Arabic text of any literary length or significance that we can actually put our hands on" remains the Quran (p. 43). The second chapter (pp. 54-96) treats "biblical lore" (as in the citation...