Quranic timeline of Prophets & archaeology
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Salaam all,
I’ve been trying to identify the Quran’s chronology of prophets recently, and am troubled by the disconnect from the archaeological record.
Quranic Timeline
Surah 7 – Al-A’raf
In 7.59-103 past prophets are named in succession: Noah > ‘Ad (Hud) > Thamud (Salih) > Lot > Midian (Shu’ayb) > and Moses.
Verse 69, Hud addresses Ad: “and remember when He made you successors to the people of Noah.”
And in verse 74, Salih addresses Thamud: “and remember when He made you successors to the people of 'Ad.”
This indicates a clear order of succession: Noah > Ad > Thamud
Then there’s a short gap from verse 93 to 103, after which it says: “Then after them We sent Moses with Our signs to Pharaoh”. Ie: Moses came after these other prophets
Surah 9 – Al-Bara’ah
In 9.70 past prophets/communities are listed again: Noah > Ad > Thamud > Ibrahim > Madyan and 'the overthrown cities' in plural
Surah 11 – Hud
In 11:25-99 the past prophets are listed again. Noah > Ad > Thamud > Ibrahim > Lot > Madian & Thamud mentioned together
In this case, Moses bookends the prophets, with a mention at the beginning of the sequence (11:17) and at the end (11:96)
In 11:89 Shu’ayb tells the people of Madian “do not let not your hatred towards me incriminate you that you suffer the fate of what afflicted the people of Noah, or the people of Hud, or the people of Saleh”. So Madian is clearly after Noah > Ad > Thamud.
So the Quranic timeline seems to be:
Noah > Ad > Thamud > Ibrahim > Lot > Midian > Moses
Archaeological Record
As I mentioned in another post, recent archaeological evidence has placed ‘Ad in the Wadi Rum region of southern Jordan. They discovered a plaque in the temple of Allat which mentions both Iram and the tribe of ‘Ad. There have been other inscriptions of Ad and Iram in that area, but never both in a single inscription. It is dated to the 1st century CE. The last inscription discovered near Jabal Ramm in Jordan that mentions Iram is from the 4th century CE! That's 300 years before Prophet Muhammad.
Thamud are mentioned many times throughout history, beginning in the 8th century BCE as fighting the Assyrians. The Assyrians deport them to Palestine, as forced deportations were a common practice of the Assyrians. They are then identified repeatedly as living in the northwest corner of Saudi Arabia, near Aqaba in Jordan. The Ruwafa temple 160-200 CE in northwest Saudi Arabia is a temple of the god ‘lh built by Thamud. Then there is an inscription in Saudi from the 4th century CE (ie. around 300 years before Islam), that mentions a war between the tribes of Gshm and Thamud. After this they disappear from the historical record and seem to get subsumed by the Roman province of Arabia, as we only find Byzantine military units in Egypt and Palestine in the 5th c. CE named after them.
The issue here is that Judaism precedes all of these in the archaeological record, whereas the Quran places Moses after them.
The origin of the ancient Israelites in the archaeological record go back to around 1200 BCE. However, in Yonatan Adler's, "The Origins of Judaism: An Archaeological-Historical Reappraisal, he argues that there is no evidence prior to the mid 2nd century BCE of anyone knowing or keeping the laws of the Torah - Terminus ante quem of the practice of Judaism - the earliest evidence we have goes back to the middle of the 2nd century and no earlier.
So it’s problematic that we have inscriptions on ruins in Jordan and Saudi dating to the 1st and 2nd centuries after Christianity, clearly referring to Iram and Ad. Not sure how to resolve this issue.
What are your thoughts? I certainly haven’t listed all Quranic references to these prophets, just ones I’ve stumbled on recently. Is there any evidence of Moses preceding Ad and Thamud? The closest I've found is 2:87, where it says that God sent many messengers after Moses
