THE RAVEN AND THE BURIAL OF ABEL
The Quran tells the story of how Allah sent a raven to show Cain how to bury Abel.
al-Ma’idah 005:031
5:31 فبعث الله غرابا يبحث في الارض ليريه كيف يواري سوءة اخيه قال ياويلتي اعجزت ان اكون مثل هذا الغراب فاوارى سوءة اخي فاصبح من النادمين
FabaAAatha Allahu ghuraban yabhathu fee al-ardi liyuriyahu kayfa yuwaree saw-ata akheehi qala ya waylata aAAajaztu an akoona mithla hatha alghurabi faowariya saw-ata akhee faasbaha mina alnnadimeena.
Maulana Ali Then Allah sent a crow scratching the ground to show him how to cover the dead body of his brother. He said: Woe is me! Am I not able to be as this crow and cover the dead body of my brother? So he became of those who regret.
kavalec.com/Quran/005.qmt.quran.aspx
This story of the raven and the burial of Abel has led critics to charge that Muhammad borrowed Jewish folklore because this account is not in the Old Testament or the Torah. In the Jewish folklore it was Adam who noticed the raven burying a dead bird and that gave him the idea to bury Abel. Thus, the parallelism isn’t with the person who did the burying but with the bit about the raven providing the idea of burial in the ground.
Critics point out four sources of this Jewish folklore; the Targum of Jonathan ben Uzziel, the Targum Yerushalmi I (aka Targum Jonathan or the Targum of Pseudo-Jonathan), the Pirke De-Rabbi Eli’ezer, and the Midrash Tanhuma. Only two are true. The Targums do not carry this story and the claim that they do is a misreading of Tisdall.
It would have been more correct to claim that the raven burial story in the Quran has its predecessor in Jewish folklore, which has also been preserved in the Pirke De-Rabbi Eli’ezer, and the Midrash Tanhuma. This is because there is no evidence that Muhammad copied from these texts. The claim should be that he probably heard the story from Jewish folklore. It is the dating of this Jewish folklore that critics should introduce those texts as evidence.
“Adam and his help mate were sitting weeping and lamenting over him [Abel], and they did not know what to do with Abel, for they were not acquainted with burial. A raven, one of whose companions had died, came. He took him and dug in the earth and buried him before his eyes. Adam said, ‘I shall do as this raven.’ Immediately, he took Abel’s corpse and dug in the earth and buried it.” (Jewish legend related by Pirqey Rabbi Eliezer, chapter XXI, quoted by Abdiyah Akbar Adul-Haqq, Sharing Your Faith with a Muslim.)
Tisdall quotes from the same source in a slightly different translation:
So also in the book Pirke Rabbi Eleazer, we find the source of the burying of Abel as described in the Coran, there being no difference excepting that the raven indicates the mode to Adam instead of to Cain, as follows:- Adam and Eve, sitting by the corpse, wept not knowing what to do, for they had as yet no knowledge of burial. A raven coming up, took the dead body of its fellow, and having scratched up the earth, buried it thus before their eyes. Adam said, Let us follow the example of the raven, and so taking up Abel’s body buried it at once. (W. St-Clair-Tisdall, Souces of Islam)
answering-islam.org.uk/Index/C/cain_and_abel.html
muhammadanism.com/Tisdall/sources_quran/p062.htm
Pirke De-Rabbi Eli’ezer
Saifullah, Ahmed and Karim of Islamic-Awareness claim that Jewish scholars have known for quite some time that Pirke De-Rabbi Eli’ezer is post-Islamic and that it cannot possibly be attributed to Rabbi Eliezer, quoting as evidence:
“The Jewish Encyclopedia published in 1905 (same year as the publication of Tisdall’s book) under “Pirke De-Rabbi Eli’ezer” informs us that: Josh was the first to point out that in the thirtieth chapter, in which at the end the author distinctly alludes to the three stages of the Mohammadan conquest, that of Arabia, of Spain, and of Rome, the names of Fatima and Ayesha occur beside that of Ishamel, leading to the conclusion that the book originated in the time when Islam was predominant in Asia Minor. As in ch. xxxvi, two brother reigning simultaneously are mentioned, after whose reign the Messiah shall come, the work might be ascribed to the beginning of the nineth century, for about that time the two sons of Harun al-Rasid, El-Amin and El-Mamun, were ruling over Islamic realm… In no case this work be ascribed to R. Eliezer (80-118 CE), since he was a tanna, while the book itself the Pirke Abot is quoted.[21]”
islamic-awareness.org/Quran/Sources/BBCandA.html
cont.
