#Rav Abba Arikha

[apenitentialprayer]

More recently, Holger Zellentin informally suggested to me a Talmudic source for Q. 5:64, a passage in BT Menahot 29b. There, R. Judah relates in the name of Rav that when Moses went up to Mount Sinai to get the Torah from God (recorded in Exodus 19-20), he came upon God sitting and painstakingly drawing crowns on the letters of the Bible. Said Moses to God, 'Master of the Universe, who delays Your hand (mi me'akev yadcha)? In other words, Moses wished to know who was preventing God from finishing His transcription of the holy text and sending it down to the Israelites. God replied that in the future a scholar named 'Aqiba ben Joseph would arise and expound mountains of rabbinic teaching on each crown. Zellentin posited that according to the rabbis God here holds Himself back, restrains His own hand, in order 'to leave the interpretation of the Torah to the Rabbis'. Indeed, rabbinic teaching, here and elsewhere, celebrates the rabbinic enterprise of Torah explication as a sort of rabbinic-God partnership that is Divinely ordained. Zellentin, however, suggests that Q. 5:64 flips this rabbinic teaching on its head, using the Talmud's own language to reject its claims. Unlike the rabbis, the Qur'an maintains that God does not restrain Himself in order to allow human participation in His revelation; what's more, for the Qur'an the claim that He does so borders on sacrilege. […] Zellentin's proposal takes into account the often polemical nature of the Qur'an's use of the texts of earlier monotheist traditions against them[.]

Shari L. Lowin (The Jews Say the Hand of God is Chained: Q. 5:64 as a Response to a Midrash in a piyyut by R. El'azar ha-Kallir). Italics original. If the title of her article doesn't make it clear, Lowin does not think this interpretation is correct; I still found it interesting.