Bibliotheca Polyglotta

▪ Jeffery1938: »In all the passages save viii, 42, it is used as though it means some sort of a Scripture sent from God. Thus ‘We gave to Moses and Aaron the Furqān and an illumination’ (xxi, 49), and ‘We gave to Moses the Book and the Furqān’ (ii, 50), where it would seem to be the equivalent of Taurah. In iii, 2, it is associated with the Taurah and the Inǧīl, and xxv, 1, and ii, 181, make it practically the equivalent of the Qurʔān, while in viii, 29, we read, ‘if ye believe God, He will grant you a Furqān and forgive your evil deeds.’ In viii, 42, however, where the reference is to the Battle of Badr, ‘the day of the Furqān, the day when the two hosts met,’ the meaning seems something quite different. / The form of the word would suggest that it was genuine Arabic, a form fuʕlān from faraqa, and thus it is taken by the Muslim authorities. Ṭab. on ii, 50, says that ‘Scripture’ is called Furqān because God faraqa bi-hī bayna ’l-ḥaqq wa’l-bāṭil and as referring to Badr it means ‘the day when God discriminated (faraqa) between the good party and the evil’ (Rāġib, Mufradāt, 385). In this latter case it is tempting to think of Jewish influence, for in the account of Saul’s victory over the Ammonites in 1 Sam. xi, 13, where the Hbr text reads h-ywm ʕśh yhwh tšwʕh b-yśrʔl, in the Targum it reads ywmʔ dyn ʕbd yhwh pwrqnh b-yśrʔl, where ywmʔ pwrqnʔ is exactly yawm al-furqān.¹ / The philologers, however, are not unanimous as to its meaning. Some took it to mean naṣr; Bayḍ. on xxi, 49, tells us that some said it meant falaq al-baḥr, and Zam. on viii, 29, collects a number of other meanings. This uncertainty and confusion is difficult to explain if we are dealing with a genuine Ar word, and is sufficient of itself to suggest that it is a borrowed term.² / Arguing from the fact that in the majority of cases it is connected with Scriptures, Hirschfeld, New Researches, 68, would derive it from [Hbr] pᵊrāqîm, one of the technical terms for the divisions of the text of the Hbr Scriptures.³ . This, however, is rather difficult, and Margoliouth, Mohammed, 145 (but see ERE, ix, 481; x, 538), while inclining to the explanation from [Hbr] pᵊrāqîm, refers it, not to the sections of the Pentateuch, but to a book of Sayings of the Jewish Fathers, which Muḥammad heard of from the Jews, and which he may have thought of as similar to the Taurah and the Inǧīl. This theory is more probable than that of Hirschfeld and has in its favour the fact that resemblances have been noted between phrases and ideas in the Qurʔān and the well-known [Hbr] prqy ʔbwt.⁴ It also, however, has its difficulties, and in any case does not explain the use of the word in viii, 42. / Linguistically there is a closer equivalence in the Aram prqn ‘deliverance, redemption’, and Geiger, 56 ff.,⁵ suggested this as the source of the Ar word. He would see the primary meaning in viii, 29 ‘He will grant you redemption and forgive your evil deeds,’ where the Targumic pwrqnʔ would fit exactly (cf. Ps. iii, 9, etc.). Nowhere, however, is pwrqnʔ used of revelation, and Geiger is forced to explain furqān in the other passages, by assuming that Muḥammad looked upon revelation as a means of deliverance from error. / Geiger’s explanation has commended itself to many scholars,⁶ but Fraenkel, Vocab, 23, in mentioning Geiger’s theory, suggested the possibility of a derivation from Syr pûrqānā, a suggestion which has been very fruitfully explored by later scholars.⁷ Not only is pûrqānā the common word for ‘salvation’ in the Peshitta and the ecclesiastical writers (PSm, 3295), but it is the normal form in the ChrPal dialect, and has passed into the religious vocabulary of Eth [Gz] as fərqān (Nöldeke-Schwally, i, 34) and Armenian as p‘owrkan.⁸ It is of much wider use than the Rabbinic pwrqnʔ, but as little does it refer to revelation, so even if we agree that the borrowing was from Syr we still have the problem of the double, perhaps triple, meaning of the word in the Qurʔān. / Sprenger thought we might explain this by assuming the influence of the Ar root faraqa on the borrowed word.⁹ Schwally, however, has suggested that this is not necessary, as the word might well have had this double sense before Muḥammad’s time, under the influence of Christian or Jewish Messianic thought,¹⁰ and Lidzbarski, ZS, i, 91, points out that in Gnostic circles ‘Erlösung und Heil besonders durch Offenbarung vermittelt werden’.¹¹ There is the difficulty, however, that there seems to be no evidence of the use of the word in Arabic earlier than the Qurʔān, and Bell, Origin, 118 ff., rightly insists that we must associate the use of the word for ‘revelation’ with Muḥammad himself. He links up the use of the word in the Qurʔān with the story of Moses and thinks that as in the story of Moses the deliverance was associated with the giving of the Law, so Muḥammad conceived of his Furqān as associated with the revelation of the Qurʔān. Wensinck, EI, ii, 120, would also attribute the use of the word in the sense of revelation to Muḥammad himself, but he thinks we have two distinct words used in the Qurʔān, one the Syr pûrqānā meaning ‘salvation’ or ‘deliverance’, and the other a genuine Ar word meaning ‘distinction’, which Muḥammad used for ‘revelation’ as ‘that which makes a distinction between the true and the false.’¹² Finally, Horovitz, KU, 77, would make a sort of combination of all these theories, taking the word as of Syr origin, but influenced by the root faraqa and also by the Hbr prqym (cf. also JPN, 216-18). / In any case it seems clear that furqān is a word that Muḥammad himself borrowed to use as a technical term, and to whose meaning he gave his own interpretation. The source of the borrowing was doubtless the vocabulary of the Aram-speaking Christians, whether or not the word was also influenced by Judaism.«

1. Lidzbarski, ZS, i, 92, notes an even closer verbal correspondence with Is. xlix, 8, where for [Hbr] w-b-ywm yšwʕh ʕzrtyk the Pesh. has [Syr] w-b-ywmʔ d-pwrqnʔ ʕdrtk. 2. This is strengthened by the fact that there are apparently no examples of its use earlier than the Qurʔān. Fleischer, Kleinere Schriften, ii, 125 ff., who opposed the theory that it is a foreign word, is compelled to admit that it was probably a coining of Muḥammad himself. See Ahrens, Christliches, 31, 32. 3. So Grimme, Mohammed, ii, 73, thinks it means ‘sections of a heavenly book’ and compares the Rabbinic pᵊraq, pirqâʰ; but see Rudolph, Abhängigkeit, 39. 4. Rudolph, Abhängigkeit, 11; Hirschfeld, Beiträge, 58. 5. So Torrey, Foundation, 48. 6. Ullmann, Der Koran (Bielefeld, 1872), p. 5; von Kremer, Ideen, 225; Sprenger, Leben, ii, 337 ff.; Pautz, Offenbarung, 81. 7. Schwally, ZDMG, Iii, 135; Knieschke, Erlosingslehre des Koran (Berlin, 1910), p. 11 ff. See also Wellhausen, ZDMG, lxvii, 633; Massignon, Lexique, 52; Mingana, Syr Influence, 85. 8. Merx, Chrestomathia Targumica, 264; Hühschmann, ZDMG, xlvi, 267; Arm Gramm., i, 318. 9. Leben, ii, 339, ‘Wenn Mohammed Forkan auch aus dem Aramäischen entnommen hat, so schwebte ihm doch die arabische Etymologie vor.’ See also Rudolph, Abhängigkeit, 39; Bell, Origin, 118; Nöldeke, Sketches, 38. 10. Nöldeke-Schwally, i, 34 : ‘in erster Linie und am wahrscheinlichsten unter Christen, in zweiter Linie in messianisch gerichteten jüdischen Kreisen.’ 11. He refers, for example, to Liechtenhan’s Die Offenbarung im Gnosticismus, p. 123 ff.; but as Rudolph, Abhängigkeit, 92, points out, this idea is not confined to Gnostic circles. 12. Wensinck seems to have been unduly influenced by the theories of the native Commentators.

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