In the preface to his new book, The Bible in Arabic: The Scriptures of the “People of the Book” in the Language of Islam, Sidney Griffith modestly insists that this work is little more than a “survey of the available scholarship,” with “no substantive contribution to the study of the Bible in Arabic” on the part of its author, whose purpose is merely “to call attention to the progress that has been made by others in this undertaking” (xi and 2). It is the pleasure of this reviewer to inform the reader of Griffith's book that this is, it turns out, not at all the case. In more than thirty years of scholarship, Sidney Griffith has played a major role in transforming the field of Christian religious and intellectual life in the medieval Islamic Near East and his latest book is both the fruit of much of that work and a novel contribution in and of itself. His book does indeed provide the invaluable service of synthesizing and assessing disparate threads of scholarship on the intertwined scriptures of the communities of the medieval Near East. But the author adds a distinct perspective and not a minor critique of prevailing scholarship, including what he calls “the general scholarly neglect of the Arabic [Bible] translations” and the limited focus of those who have written on the subject (207–208), all of which secure the book's lasting impact and contribution.

Already in the first chapter, Griffith parts ways with prevailing scholarship in two key respects. In the first instance, he argues against the current consensus that an Arabic translation of the Bible predates the Qur'an. Griffith draws his conclusion from a cautious assessment of the available evidence and from the fact that the Qur'an references numerous biblical traditions without actually citing the biblical text. He accepts that Arabic translations prior to the seventh century did exist orally for utilization in churches and synagogues, yet only on a temporary and ad hoc basis. Griffith does permit himself a hypothesis of his own as to the motivation for the first written Bible translations in the eighth century. Rather than attribute the motivation for the Qur'an's self-evident interest in biblical lore to familiarity with a preexisting Arabic Bible, Griffith proposes that it was the encounter with the Qur'an (and the desire to correct its perceived fallacies) that prompted the undertaking of the first complete Arabic Bible translations. As a result, our author identifies the Qur'an as the first Arabic book that, by the eighth and ninth centuries, generated “the rise of a widespread culture of writing among the Arabs” (109).

Griffith also departs from prevailing scholarship in arguing that the Christians mentioned in the Qur'an should be viewed not as marginal groups, such as the hypothetical Judaeo-Christian community occasionally proffered by scholars, but as the mainstream confessional denominations known to the region beginning in the late antique period, commonly identified in the West as the Melkite, Jacobite, and Nestorian churches. Drawing on his earlier work and critique of the scholarly consensus (87, n. 72), Griffith proposes that, by the seventh century, a range of biblical, liturgical, and creedal traditions were transmitted orally throughout the Arabian Peninsula as a result of contact with the mainstream Syriac- and Ge'ez-speaking Christian communities living on the periphery of Arabia. According to Griffith, scholars have misidentified the Christians in the Qur'an by regarding the latter's anti-Christian rhetoric as a mere misunderstanding of Christian doctrine, “as if the Qur'an had no agenda of its own” (24), rather than recognizing in the Qur'an a sophisticated polemic and commentary on actual Christian traditions.

This last critique is developed further in chapter 2, which contains some of the author's most original insights on the nature of scriptural “recall” or “reminiscence” in the Qur'an. Here, Griffith examines the full range of the Qur'an's “creative interface” with its scriptural predecessors, according to which biblical characters and narratives are dramatically recast, not indiscriminately but in line with the new scripture's distinctive prophetology. Notwithstanding the author's incisive argument for the sophistication of Qur'anic anti-Christian polemic, questions remain. Given the nature of the oral transmission of biblical and extrabiblical lore and the fact that the original sources eluded the author of the Islamic scriptures, it is worth considering whether the Qur'an's “creative interface” with these traditions need not exclude more mundane instances of misunderstanding or misrepresentation. The two possibilities are by no means mutually exclusive, as is evident from the author's own account of the Qur'anic rendering of the Ten Commandments (78–80).

If there is a deficiency in Griffith's book, it is a result of the author's well-intentioned effort to broaden his subject to include not only Christian Bible translations but their Jewish counterparts. Here the author cites a good deal of the relevant scholarship, but his own assessment of the material is notably less penetrating and original than with the Christian tradition. Apart from an occasional philological lapse with Hebrew and onomastic lapse with Jewish sages, the attention devoted to identifying the Jewish communities depicted in the Qur'an and to the character and scope of early Jewish translation activity is much reduced when compared with its Christian parallel. When one contrasts, for example, the bulk of the nearly fifty pages of chapter 1 devoted to Christians and pre-Islamic Christian Bible translation with the few paragraphs on the Jews of Arabia toward the beginning of the chapter and the single paragraph devoted to the question of pre-Islamic Jewish Bible translation toward the end, the disparity is quite apparent. One also wonders why an analysis of Christian Arabic biblical commentary in the chapter devoted to Christian translation has no parallel in the following chapter on Jewish translation, whether in its rabbinic or Karaite forms. This shortfall need not detract from the book's many strengths and should serve as an impetus for others to pick up the unfinished thread of Griffith's scholarship.

In the final analysis, The Bible in Arabic is a rich and original contribution to a range of interconnected fields. The book is an invaluable resource for medievalists, biblicists, and intellectual historians, all of whom stand to gain from a careful reading of this work. Most important is the critical light it casts on an understudied phenomenon of creative translation in Christian and Jewish societies of the medieval Near East. In comparison with the better known translation movement of Greek to Arabic between the eighth and eleventh centuries under the Abbasids, Griffith argues that scholars neglect “the Judaeo-Christian Arabic translation movement” (undertaken during the same time period and, in the Christian case, by some of the same translators) at their own peril. The rise of translation as a creative medium, Griffith observes, “marked a new era in the intellectual lives of the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim communities living together in the Arabic-speaking World of Islam” (1, and see p. 127).