Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

8 t CHAPTER ONE
The Covenant and the Covenants
The Bible makes it perfectly clear that the Israelites, later called
Jews, are the Chosen People, and why not, since they transcribed
and preserved it. Why, then, do the Christians and Muslims think
they are? First, recall that the Christians were themselves Jews, and
that when they claimed they were Abraham’s heirs they were earmarking
themselves, like other Jewish sects, as the one faithful
remnant among God’s own. They were following Abraham in
faith in their conviction that Jesus was the promised Messiah, an
argument spelled out at some length in Paul’s Letter to the Romans.
There were also plentiful suggestions scattered through the
Bible that God was more than a little displeased with his people.
There were even hints, like those dropped in Jeremiah 31, that the
Covenant might be renegotiated, which is, the Christians claimed,
exactly what happened. Finally, the Christians also maintained
that this was a “new covenant” (Gk. nea diatheke; Lat. novum
testamentum) for an eschatological moment in the history of Israel,
one that justified the Gentiles’ (the goyim, or non-Jews) being
drawn into “the Kingdom,” to use Jesus’ own preferred image for
the End Time. Faith, then, was at the base of the Christians’ claim
to the Covenant, faith in Jesus, and not mere obedience of the Law.
The Quran seems to have seen it quite differently. It knows a
number of different divinely initiated covenants (ahd, mithaq)
from Adam (20:115) onward through all the prophets; including
Jesus and Muhammad (33:7). Though a covenant was made with
the Christians (5:14)—there is no sign that it was “new” in any
Christian sense of that word—it is the one made with Moses on
Sinai that appears to have a special significance in the Quran. It is
mentioned several times (e.g., 2:63, 93), and in one of its presentations
(2:83) it is spelled out in terms that faintly echo the Ten Commandments,
albeit with a distinctly Muslim cast: “Worship none
save God, be good to parents and to kindred and to the orphans
and the needy, and speak kindly to humankind and establish
prayer (salat) and pay the tithe (zakat).”
From one perspective, there is no difference among these covenants
that God “exacts” from his chosen prophets and their fol-