Apologetics: Flippin’ Fatwa Friday – The Quran vs. The Bible: The Exodus Part 2.

Well, now that I have finally worked up the will power to climb back into this series again, it’s time to talk about the Quran’s Rings of Power worthy destruction of the Exodus story.

Yay….

If you guys didn’t read Part 1, here’s the run down. Pharoah was treating the Israelites badly, enslaving them and killing all the baby boys. Then here comes Moses, and Allah tells his mother to put him in a basket and send him downriver. Moses’s mother does this, Pharoah’s daughter finds him, says, “Aw, cute!” and decides to adopt him, but since she can’t breastfeed and Moses’s sister (who had been following him) is there to recommend his mother be his nurse, Moses is reunited with his mom. Then Moses grows up in Pharoah’s household, kills a dude, runs away, gets hitched to some nice girl he met in Midian, gets the call from Allah to go back to Egypt, and the five (?) plagues happen (which only four of them line up with the Bible. Later, it says there are nine plagues/signs in Surah 17:101.)

This raises a bunch of theological questions since it totally retcons the importance of the Passover for Judaism and Christianity, but you can read about that in Part 1. Time to focus on what happens after all that.

So, after Moses sent the five (nine?) plagues on the Egyptians, they finally had enough (Surah 7:134-135) and were begging Moses to get the hell outta Egypt with all the Israelites. So, Moses did and quickly left over the course of the night as Allah had instructed him to do, bringing with him the few Israelites (Surah 10:83) who had faith in Allah. However, after the Israelites left and all the plagues were removed from Egypt, Pharoah looked around and realized, “Crap. All our free labor is gone.” Realizing this, he then mobilized a large force to go and recapture the Israelites (Surah 7:135, 10:90, 20:78, 26:53-60, 43:50-54).

This is where the story continues to diverge from the original Exodus account. While Pharoah is pursuing Moses, Moses splits the Red Sea, (which Allah had told him to do earlier the night before). Moses does so and the Israelites run through. Pharoah sees that and decides it’s a good idea to follow them, and the sea crashes in on him and his army. However, unlike what we get in the Bible where we have not sure exactly what happened to Pharoah during the Red Sea incident, in the Quran, Pharoah is there and when the sea crashes over him and he’s drowning, we get two strange details. First, according to the Yousif Ali translation of Surah 10:90-92, Pharoah converts to Islam. Second, we get a very odd contradiction. In 10:92, it says that Allah preserved Pharoah to act as a warning to everyone else. Meanwhile, in other verses about this, it says he died. So, which one is it? Is he alive, or is this referring to mummification? If the latter option, since they did that to all their pharaohs, then why would he necessarily stand out as a warning?

From there, we come to the Israelites and the Golden Calf incident, resulting in the 40-year trek in the wilderness (God must’ve cursed them with having Apple Maps for their GPS). While the Golden Calf incident remains similar to the Exodus account (though the Israelites are pissed that God won’t show His face to them and Aaron basically gets disowned by Moses, which that’s not what happened in the Bible), a bunch of fluff is added to this story in the Quran, such as the Israelites going to some towns to supplement their diets of manna and quail.

Remember, this is the wilderness. The middle of nowhere Middle East. Where are these random villages coming from if they haven’t made it to the Promised Land? Are they just randomly spawning for no reason? The heck?

And as a bit of an epilogue, to return to our buddies in Egypt, according to the Quran, Allah destroyed what Pharoah and the Egyptians had “constructed and established” (Surah 7:137). Except that’s not true according to history since Egypt survived for several more centuries after Moses.

But what else are we expecting from a religion that put Pharoah, the Tower of Babel, and Haman in the same timeline (Surah 28:38)? Or from the religion that in Surah 2:53 confirms the Torah is the Word of God while its followers are forced to defend their book by denying that the Torah and Gospel are the Word of God because they so clearly contradict the Quran?

Until next time,

M.J.