The Death of a Prophet. Stephen J. Shoemaker
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that subdued their territory and brought it under the dominion of his religious movement. Nonetheless, as will be seen in the remainder of this chapter, the wide range of sources conveying this tradition strongly suggests that such a misunderstanding is unlikely to be the origin of this difference between the Islamic and non-Islamic sources. If such confusion were the cause of Muhammad’s representation as still living at the beginning of the Palestinian campaign, then one must assume that a large number of independent sources have somehow separately made the same mistake. While this certainly is not impossible, it becomes increasingly improbable with each source, and the broad geographic spread of this tradition across the various religious communities of the early Islamic world instead suggests more probably a primitive tradition that underlies these reports. Likewise, the fact that no source “correctly” locates Muhammad’s death before the Palestinian invasion or otherwise clearly separates him from these events before the emergence of his official Islamic biography in the middle of the eighth century is a strong indication that this association of Muhammad with the conquest of Palestine reflects an early tradition that circulated widely among the different religious groups of the Mediterranean world in the seventh and eighth centuries. There are, as will be seen in chapters to follow, other more likely explanations for the discrepancy between these early sources and the later Islamic tradition on this issue. Consequently, even if Muhammad did not in fact survive to personally lead the invasion of Palestine, as the Doctrina Iacobi reports, the convergence of so many sources on this point seems to reveal what is likely an early tradition, presumably coming from within Islam itself, that Muhammad led his followers into the Abrahamic land of promise. There they seem to have anticipated that he would guide them to meet the eschaton’s impending arrival, signaled here by Jewish expectations of the messiah’s appearance.
The Apocalypse of Rabbi Shimʿōn b. Yoḥai (635–45?)
As Crone and Cook are quick to note in Hagarism, certain medieval Jewish apocalyptic traditions ascribed to Rabbi Shimʿōn b. Yoḥai form an important compliment to the Doctrina Iacobi’s witness, particularly in providing further evidence of a messianic understanding of the Islamic conquests among many contemporary Jews.23 Nevertheless, Crone and Cook fail to note the parallel indication by these Jewish visionary texts that Muhammad led his followers in the invasion of Palestine, an oversight owing itself most likely to their dependence on Bernard Lewis’s translation of a key passage in 1950.24 While Lewis’s translation is certainly not incorrect, it is problematic inasmuch as it obscures certain grammatical ambiguities that are essential for the present question of Muhammad’s relation to the invasion of Palestine. As will be seen, the full complement of witnesses to these Rabbi Shimʿōn b. Yoḥai traditions indicates that this early Jewish vision of the Islamic conquests identified Muhammad as the leader of the Ishmaelite army that was believed to be the agent of Israel’s divine deliverance from Roman oppression in Palestine.
Several closely related apocalyptic texts describe Rabbi Shimʿōn’s visions of the Islamic conquests, each giving a slightly different version of events that seems to depend on an earlier common source. The earliest of these works, and also the most important, is The Secrets of Rabbi Shimʿōn b. Yoḥai, an apocalypse written sometime around the middle of the eighth century whose visions cover the period between the Islamic conquests and the ʿAbbāsid revolution. As The Secrets begins, Rabbi Shimʿōn reflects on the “Kenite” of Numbers 24:21, which is revealed to him as a prediction concerning the Ishmaelites and their coming dominion over the land of Israel.25 When he cries aloud with frustration, asking if the Jews had not yet suffered enough oppression at the hands of Edom (that is, Rome), the angel Metatron comes to him and reassures him that God will use the Ishmaelites to free the Jews from Byzantine oppression. “Do not be afraid, mortal, for the Holy One, blessed be He, is bringing about the kingdom of Ishmael only for the purpose of delivering you from that wicked one (that is, Edom [Rome]). In accordance with His will He shall raise up over them a prophet. And he will conquer the land for them [
In view of this rather positive assessment of Muhammad’s prophetic mission and the early years of Islamic rule, numerous scholars have observed that The Secrets of Rabbi Shimʿōn almost certainly depends on a much earlier source for its description of these events.30 It is hard to imagine that a Jewish author of the mid-eighth century would have written so glowingly of the advent of Islam, painting Muhammad and his followers in such messianic hues over a century later. Moreover, as Crone and Cook rightly observe, “the messiah belongs at the end of an apocalypse and not in the middle” as one finds in The Secrets, an anomaly that also seems to indicate the inclusion of older material.31 On the whole, the character of this section of the apocalypse strongly suggests that The Secrets here has incorporated some very lightly edited traditions from an older Jewish apocalypse that was roughly contemporary with the events of the conquests themselves, possibly written in the first decade after the Arab invasions. Moreover, this lost apocalypse appears to relate the perspective of a Jewish group either within the early Islamic movement or closely allied with it. We have long known from the Islamic tradition itself that in the early stages Jewish groups were welcomed into Muhammad’s new religious community while maintaining their Jewish identity. Yet according to Muhammad’s early biographers, this was a brief experiment limited to certain Jewish tribes of Medina that was quickly abandoned after it failed. There is increasing evidence, however, that for the first several decades Muhammad’s followers comprised an inter-confessional, eschatological religious movement focused on Jerusalem and the Holy Land that welcomed Jews and other monotheists within the community, as will be seen further in the final chapter. The older apocalypse of Rabbi Shimʿōn echoed in this more recent text almost certainly derives from this milieu: otherwise, it is difficult to understand its proclamation of the invading Arabs as divinely appointed “messianic” deliverers who would restore worship to the Temple Mount.
It is of special note that this seventh-century apocalypse of Rabbi Shimʿōn appears to have described this Ishmaelite “messiah,” unmistakably here Muhammad, as leading this conquest of the Holy Land and liberating it from the Romans. Yet Lewis translates the crucial passage, cited above, as follows: “He raises up over them a Prophet according to His will and will conquer the land for them and they will come and restore it in greatness.”32 Lewis’s translation determines God, “the Holy One,” as the actor who will conquer the land for the Ishmaelites. The Hebrew, however, is in fact ambiguous on this point. The verb in question is an imperfect third-person singular (יכבוש), and thus its subject is potentially either God or the prophet that God will raise up. Lewis has determined to understand God as the one who will conquer the land, and while this certainly is a possibility, it seems more likely that the prophet is in fact intended: God will raise up the prophet, but it is the prophet who will lead the conquest of the land. No doubt Lewis was inspired to translate the passage as he did by the Islamic historical tradition, which relates Muhammad’s death in Medina prior to the invasion of Palestine. Writing in 1950, Lewis was presumably unaware of this counter-tradition that Muhammad led his followers in the initial assault on Palestine; consequently, he not unreasonably assumed that The Secrets and its source envisioned God, rather than Muhammad, as subduing the land, since according to the received Islamic tradition Muhammad was already dead by this time.