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ETYMOLOGY

By Ali Suleman
01 July, 2016

Regardless of which religion you follow, the names of the books mentioned in the title shouldn’t be new to your ears. The holy texts of Islam, Christianity and Judaism are, according to the Islamic belief, all Divine Revelations from God.

Divine revelations

Regardless of which religion you follow, the names of the books mentioned in the title shouldn’t be new to your ears. The holy texts of Islam, Christianity and Judaism are, according to the Islamic belief, all Divine Revelations from God.

Quran literally means “the recitation”. The word is a verbal noun from the Arabic verb qara’a which means “he recited”. The word iqra has the same roots, and means “recite”, an imperative verb.

Linguistically speaking, Quran has made a huge impact on the human race. It is solely due to the Quran that 300 million native Arabic speakers can communicate with each other in one standard form of language. From the Tigris and Euphrates in Iraq to the sand dunes of Morocco, you will find no difficulty communicating if you know the classical Arabic of the Quran. Although the Arabic dialects differ a lot from each other, natives of all Arabic-speaking countries are capable of understanding the standard Quranic Arabic.

If it wasn’t for the Quran, the Arabic language would have drastically drifted apart in the Middle East and North Africa during the last fourteen centuries. We have the example of a nation that started off with Arabic but when Quran was taken away from them, a totally different language emerged over centuries - Maltese. The syntax, grammar and one-third vocabulary of Maltese is still Arabic, but half of its vocabulary is from Italian or Sicilian and the remaining from English or French, making it unintelligible for Arabic speakers. So, the Quran has acted as a uniting force that has bound today’s Arabic speaking world into one large community.

On the other hand, Bible literally means “the book”. The Quran uses the word Injil for Bible, which came from Syriac Aramic word awongaleeyoon, derived from the Greek euangelion literally meaning “good news”. The English word “evangel” comes from the same Greek root.

The word “Bible” was introduced to English through French, a Romance language (having Latin as a direct ancestor). The Latin word was Biblia, through which words like “bibliography” and “bibliophile” also originated. But Latin itself adopted the word from the Greek word biblion which literally meant “paper or scroll”. In Greek, ta biblia to hagia simply meant “the Holy Books”. Experts believe that the Egyptian papyrus was exported to Egypt through the Phoenician port Byblos, hence they started calling the product after the name of the place it came from. Imagine what would happen if we start doing the same. “Hey, today I put China in China and went to watch China but there was no China. Oh, did I tell you about my China?” (Translation: Hey, today I put a dish in microwave and went to watch TV but there was no electricity. Oh, did I tell you about my necklace?)

Last but not the least, the Torah is the sacred text of Judaism and has been referred to as Taurat in the Quran. Torah is considered by all three major Abrahamic religions as the undisputed word of God. While Tanakh (also called Mikra in Hebrew) is the comprehensive collection of texts upon which the Old Testaments are based, Torah is only a part of it. Tanakh consists of 24 books in total, out of which the first five constitute the Torah, and this is the reason why Torah is also called Pentateuch (Latin: penta - five, teuch - anything produced). Tanakh is the acronym of the first letters of its three main sections: Torah, Nevi’im, Ketuvim.

The word “Torah” in Hebrew literally means “instruction” or “law”, a verbal noun from horah which means “he taught, showed”. The five books Torah consists of are Genesis (origin), Exodus (going out), Leviticus (relating to the Levites), Numbers (numbering of the Israelites) and Deuteronomy (second law). The Ten Commandments given to Moses on Mount Sinai are included in the Exodus as well as in Deuteronomy.

 Islam, among the three, is the only religion that acknowledges all three aforementioned books as the divine revelations from God. Although Taurat and Injil are not considered to be in their original form right now, there are still signs that correspond with the message of Quran.