by Mohammad Asghar
The Quran Says:
7:137: “And We made a people, considered weak (and of no account), inheritors of lands in both East and West, - lands whereon We sent down our blessings. The fair promise of thy Lord was fulfilled for the Children of Israel, because they had patience and constancy, and We leveled to the ground the great Works and fine Buildings which Pharaoh and his people erected (with such pride).”
7:138: “We took the Children of Israel (with safety) across the sea. They came upon a people devoted entirely to some idols they had. They said: “O Moses! Fashion for us a god like unto gods they have. He said: “Surely ye are a people without knowledge,”
We believe verse 7:137 should have come after verse 7:138, as the former talks about the Hebrews being made inheritors of a land (‘promise fulfilled’), which could have happened only after they had crossed the Sea and settled down in part of Palestine, which He had allocated to them, and not before. Keeping this in mind, let us find out what Allah has actually said through these verses.
Contrary to the stand of the Quran, the Book of Genesis, or the Torah, describes a man called Abraham, son of Terah, as a Hebrew. It says that he lived with his parents in Ur, the land of the Chaldeans. Terah took his family to Haran, where he died, whereupon, Abraham migrated with his family to Canaan. Some believe this happened toward the end of 2000 B.C. The Canaanites called them ‘Hebrews,’ the foreigners.
During the 2nd millennium BC, Ancient Egyptian texts use the term Canaan to refer to an Egyptian province, whose boundaries generally corroborate the definition of Canaan found in the Hebrew Bible, bounded to the west by the Mediterranean Sea, to the north in the vicinity of Hamath in Syria, to the east by the Jordan Valley, and to the south by a line extended from the Dead Sea to around Gaza (Numbers 34). Nevertheless, the Egyptian and Hebrew uses of the term are not identical: the Egyptian texts also identify the coastal city of Qadesh in Syria near Turkey as part of the "Land of Canaan", so that the Egyptian usage seems to refer to the entire Levantine coast of the Mediterranean Sea, making it a synonym of another Egyptian term for this coastland.
The Hebrews lived and prospered in Canaan until they were driven by foreign aggressors and the tribal warfare of its original inhabitants to its worst areas, spread thinly across the entire region. Canaan became Palestine, after it was conquered by the Philistines.
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Pertinent Links:
1) Debunking the Quran
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