Forms and Functions of Legal Discourse Intertextuality in Works of Jewish and Islamic Law and Literature – Quotations, Allusions, References, and Plagiarism

This paper will survey and categorize the Qurʾān’s allusions to Biblical and Rabbinic law. My primary aim is to illuminate understudied aspects of both Qurʾānic law and Qurʾānic theology. A secondary aim is to consider the importance of these allusions with regard to sura form and composition. Although older scholarship on the Qurʾān plumbed Rabbinic and Biblical literature intensively for sources of borrowing and influence, including in the area of law, that older scholarship was complexly intertwined with the emerging Wissenschaft des Judentums. Consequently, it paid less attention to the Qurʾān’s literary form and its characteristic modes of expression. More recent scholarship has shown an intense interest in the Qurʾān’s literary form, especially the literary form of individual suras. And yet, the recent structural(ist) approaches to literary form evince remarkably little interest in law. The Qurʾān’s allusions to Biblical and Rabbinic law contain important clues to Qurʾānic theology, and the Qurʾān’s deployments of references to Biblical and Rabbinic law often mark key structural moments in the suras in which those references occur.