Pharaoh Ishmael

Ahmed Bahador's "Essay on the Prophecies Respecting Mohammed as Contained in Both the Old and the New Testament" laid out the case for Islam as the inheritance from Abraham. Sha'i ben-Tekoa counterargues that, from a Jewish perspective. I predict that ben-Tekoa will convince zero Muslims.

Ben-Tekoa points out that Jews hold genetics from the mother. He traces ancestry back to the Ark. There, he has a problem. The impartial judge would admit that these three sons of Noah had wives, which women they did not share in common. If these women are so important to The Dên Of Noah ... what are their names?

For Noah himself, ben-Tekoa must read "Noah's wife"; or, perhaps, "Umm Sarah", like Jubilees (for her birthname, Naamah seems popular). For Shem he'd read "Shem's wife". On topic of Jubilees, this one is big on supplying the names which Torah omits: the mother of Shem's children, here, was Sedeqetelebab.

Ben-Tekoa's next problem that he does not accept Jubilees, despite its existence as a Hebrew text (this or that chapter aside) at the Dead Sea. He dismisses 1 Maccabees as "Koine" where it was, in fact, Hebrew too and has been made (great in) Hebrew again. (The additions to Esther don't look Christian, either.) A kafir of Jubilees must fall back upon the Torah.

The Torah has patriarchal origins and that is why, unlike Jubilees, it doesn't bother with all the womens' names - these were not matriarchs. Islam, like the Mormons, has taken a different reading than is done among the Jews.

A Jew would shift his stance, then, upon "the oral Torah". I concede - this existed, supplying lore to preQumranian text like Jubilees (and Tobit), despite such text's heresies (like incest). But when did this Tradition exist? Yonatan Adler elsewhere is saying the very Torah didn't exist before Ptolemy I Lagides. The quotidian praxis of what the Maccabees have dubbed "Judaism", and the oral lore around that praxis, would be datable to ... 1 Maccabees.

Some apologists for Jewish tradition will include the preservation of the text. I hope Ben-Tekoa does not take this to the same conclusion as we Catholics do for our own New Testament, because this just takes us back to those Ptolemies. To such apologists: Jews preserved a Torah. The Samaritans and the Greek Jews of Egypt preserved recognisable Tawrât also; mostly inferior, yes, but not in all places, which is why biblical-critics still get paid. (and as transmitters i'll put up, say, the greeks' jeremiah against the masoretic scramble any day, come @ me bro)

As for Ishmael as a Hamite: I'll spot him one and not mention the ancestry of Zipporah. I'm more concerned with Moses' whole tribe, that of Levi. This tribe in general proliferated with Egyptian names. Manetho came right out and said it, to Ptolemy of Mendes: Egyptian heretics, not Jews, ran the Tabernacle. The Banu Levi were at least as Egyptian and "Hamite" as are the Banu Ishmael.

In short, Ishmaelite Arabs' reading of this text is at least as valid as is Ben-Tekoa's and if he doesn't like it, too bad for him.