38 r Brannon Wheeler
conceived and portrayed by Muslim exegesis. This is analogous to how
Christian “Old Testament Theology” reconstructs a “history” of the Bible
that features the origins and development of certain key Christological
concepts such as covenant, salvation, and messianism. The Muslim recon-
struction of the history of prophethood is not unlike how Christian theo-
logians claim the Old Testament prefigures the mission of Jesus Christ; for
Muslim exegetes, the evidence of the Bible and ancient Near East testifies
to the Quran and the prophet Muhammad as a continuation and culmi-
nation of the ancient history of prophethood.
The lack of attention given to the historicity of the Quran’s accounts of
ancient prophets is particularly striking given the rich history of using the
Bible as a source for the history of the ancient Near East. Parallels between
the Quran and the Bible would seem to suggest at least the possibility of
using the Quran to supplement the information found in the Bible. This
would seem especially relevant for that scholarship focusing on the Ara-
bian Peninsula and the Arabs in the Bible and the ancient world. Histori-
ans and biblical scholars, however, whether they accept or reject biblical
sources, routinely ignore the Quran and Muslim exegesis in their study of
ancient Arabia.^90
Baruch Halpern observes that the Bible is judged to be history not be-
cause it contains a factual account of the past but rather because it knows
it is lying about that past.^91 The Bible and, mutatis mutandis, the Quran
and its exegesis are historical insofar as they tell a story that communicates
a certain message. History is not just a more or less accurate account of
“what happened” without the direction of the context in which the story
of the past is told, redacted, and received. Nor is the issue about whether
the account in the Quran is more accurate than in the Bible. Muslim ex-
egetes use certain parts of the Quran, such as the “Arab prophets,” to pull
together a larger conception of prophecy that makes the Bible an example
of the more general model of ancient prophecy, a model that is consistent
with the paradigm of prophethood in the Quran and the mission of the
prophet Muhammad. Indeed, the generic nature of the Quranic model
of prophethood allows Muslim exegetes to highlight the cultic practices
associated with Yahweh in the Bible, evidence of practices often ignored
by Jewish and Christian interpretation. Muslim exegesis represents a con-
scious and strategic decision to place the biblical text within the context of
the ancient Near East and a certain conception of prophets and prophecy
among the Arabs.