Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 March 2025
This chapter begins by exploring the interpretations of the story of Noah in Rabbinic Judaism from the third century CE onwards to the end of the first millennium. It demonstrates how the rabbinic interpretations of the story of Noah took precedence over the Biblical account, as the rabbis engaged with paganism, Christianity, Gnosticism, and Islam, adapting their reading of the Hebrew Scriptures to the cultures that surrounded them while they told and retold the Scriptures. The chapter demonstrates how the Noah story in the Qur’an, derived from the Biblical one, remains the bedrock of Islamic readings. And, like Christian and Jewish interpreters, where the Islamic commentators found gaps in the Qur’anic account, they filled them in, and where they found difficulties, they clarified them, sometimes by drawing from the details in the Genesis story and in the rabbinic tradition.
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