#in greek mythology it was believed Immortality was gained by poetry

[wineaunt420]

It's actually crazy that I look at fanart of Oilslick that was posted when I was 6-14 years old 💀💀 I genuinely forget how old Transformers animated is

It's actually weirdly beautiful how after all these years different generations have equally found joy and adoration in the transformers continuations (Especially Tfa) and how Derek j wyatt has essentially immortalised himself through his work in bringing happiness to people's childhoods and adulthoods

I might be getting deep but Transformers has been my biggest hyperfixation (and most expensive) for years now so I feel I get to go deep with it

[zodiac-queens]

Goddesses that represent Creativity and Manifestation for the Zodiac Signs

Aries - Saraswati

origin: Hindu

Call on Saraswati when you need intellectual enlightenment and an extra blessing in creative pursuits.

A personification of one of the most important rivers in India, Saraswati is the Hindu goddess of knowledge, music and arts. Legendary for her beauty and grace, she’s known for her brilliant white skin, which represents the light of knowledge. She’s celebrated during a festival in the spring, Vasant Panchami, where people worship her to achieve enlightement through knowledge. Her companion is a white swan (hamsa), who in myth is believed to be able to separate milk from water - a representation of Saraswati’s ability to separate good from evil. She travels on the swan, an animal that’s a symbol of spiritual perfection and transcendence, so she’s also called Hamsavahini, meaning “she who has a hamsa as her vehicle.”

Taurus - Tyche

origin: Greek/ Roman:Fortuna

Call on Tyche when you want good luck and fortune on your side. Make her traditional offerings with honey, milk, and cakes in the shape of a wheel.  

Goddess of fortune and luck, Tyche is a blind goddess who is often portrayed with a blindfold over her eyes. This is a nod to fortune not discriminating upon whom it bestows luck; and it also refers to Tyche following her intuition rather than her sight to better determine the wind of fate. The daughter of Titan gods Oceanus and Tethys, Tyche gained immortality and was elevated to a goddess by Zeus after she helped him save Olympus from Gaia’s schemes during a battle with the Titans. She’s often portrayed with a wheel of destiny and a cornucopia, as she oversees both the direction of one’s luck and the abundance of life. A fickle goddess,Tyche can turn one’s fortunes quickly. Since soldiers adored her and often carried her symbols into battle, her legend spread across many continents.

Gemini, Virgo - Benten

origin: Japanese

Call on Benten when you need an extra boost of luck on your side - especially when it comes to creative endeavors.

Benten is the Japanese sea goddess of eloquence and beauty. Talent, wealth, wisdom, romance, and music all fall under her domain. She was the only goddess among the Seven Gods of Good Fortune, a group of gods who traveled together on a treasure ship, and the only one who grants good luck and happiness. She’s also the patron goddess of geishas and lovers of art. Daughter of a dragon king, Benten married another dragon who was terrorizing the island of Enoshima. His love for her transformed him into a perfect gentleman. Together, they live in Lake Biwa which is shaped like and named after her favorite instrument, a short-necked lute. Benten is often depicted with white snakes as her messengers - so it’s goodd luck in Japanese culture to see a white snake.

Cancer - Chang-O

origin: Chinese

Call on Chang-o when you’re seeking the answer to your secret wish or question, especially during a full moon.

Chang-o is the Chinese goddess of the moon, where she resides with a rabbit and a three-legged toad. Before her current residency, Chang-o lived on Earth with her husband Yi, and archer, and was an attendant of the goddess Hsi Wang Mu. When Yi shot nine of the ten suns out of the sky, the couple was stripped of their deity status as punishment. Chang-o begged Hsi Wang Mu to help them out of their mortal sentence with her magic peaches, and Hsi Wang Mu took pity on them by making two elixirs from her fruit to make them immortal, though not gods, again. Chang-o decided to drink both potions, hoping to become a goddess with the extra dose of magic  but instead become so light she floated up to the moon. She did indeed become a goddess again, but she is now forever tied to the moon. The annual Moon Festival, also known as the Autumn Harvest Festival, is held in celebration of Chang-o and the power of the divine feminine force of yin in yin and yang.  

Leo - Aditi 

origin: Hindu 

Call on Aditi when you want to create your own world of happiness. 

Mother of the endless universe, Aditi is one of the earliest sky goddesses in the Hindu pantheon. Her name translates to “limitless”, just like her reach and powers. She existed before time and is said to be the goddess of the past and the future, controlling all of time. Aditi is also the source of the stars, suns, planets, and moons and then gave birth to twelve Adityas, who were spirits that became the twelve Zodiac signs. They take turns ruling the cosmos by month and created all the gods and goddesses. 

Libra, Pisces - The Muses

origin: Greek 

Call on the Muses when you’re looking for inspiration and a boost in your talent; especially the one who oversees your specific area. 

Daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, the nine goddesses overseeing arts and sciences are also known as the Muses. Each of the Muses oversees a different aspect of creativity; Calliope is poetry; Clio, history; Euterpe ,lyrical poetry; Melpomene, tragedy; Thalia, comedy; Terpsichore, dance; Polyhymnia, music and storytelling; Urania, astronomy; and Erato, erotic poetry and mime. However, if one Muse is present, anyone can petition them for their inspiration in any aspect. Gifting mortal endeavors with their divine spirit, Muses are loving and joyfull, often singing songs of praise. They also bestow mortals with talent and skill. Often they’re worshipped with milk, honey and wine. 

Scorpio - Ran 

origin: Norse

Call on Ran’s strength and persistence in pursuing all that you desire in manifesting a paradise of your own. 

Goddess of the sea, Ran is a beautiful mermaid who lives in a golden paradise under the waves. Ran has a magical fishing net that she uses to capture ships and sailors, bringing permanent guests into her home. Known as a dangerous goddess, ran was blamed for shipwrecks, men overboard, and disappearances at sea. Because of her reputed love for gold and finer things, sailors would tuck coins into their pockets for protection - so that she could take those instead of their souls. With her husband, Aegir, Ran had nine beautiful daughters, known as the spirits of the waves. 

Sagittarius, Aquarius - Athena

origin: Greek/ Roman:Minerva

Call on Athena when you need to access your inner intuition and wisdom.

Daughter of Zeus, Athena is the Greek goddess of wisdom, arts, and war, making her a triple threat and a central figure of feminine and intellectual strength. Although known as the goddess of war, Athena represents the reason and strategy aspect of battle. She’s often portrayed with an owl on her right shoulder, representing wisdom, and Medusa on her shield, representing Athena’s ties to earlier mythologies from pre-Greek cultures. Athena is also credited with gifting the world with art, and teaching humans weaving, pottery, and architecture.

Capricorn - Nüwa

origin: Chinese

Call on Nüwa when you want to create something beautiful out of the raw material of your life.

Half human and half dragon, Nüwa is an ancient Chinese goddess of creation. She wandered the Earth alone until she saw her own reflection in the Yellow River and molded the first human out of the clay on the riverbanks. Much to her delight, the figure, which had legs instead of a dragon tail, came alive and called her “Mother”; so she made many more. Nüwa made males and females so that they could reproduce and granted them mortality. After growing tired of making so many people,she dipped a rope into clay and spattered drops around the ground. This is the legend of how nobles (the molded clay) and peadants (the droppings) were made.

source: Ann Shen - Legendary Ladies

[quranreadalong]

#104, Surah 18

THE QURAN READ-ALONG: DAY 104

Gather round, friends. It’s time for a section I’d like to call...

Al-Khidr is one of the strangest figures within the Quran and within the context of Islamic mythology as a whole, and throughout Islamic history, no one has determined where he came from. He is clearly important--the wisest man alive, one who seems to appear in some weird, mystical way, one who carries out tasks assigned by Allah--yet we don’t even know his name! Like I said, the story variant in which the rabbis ask Mohammed about him seems to imply that Arab Jews were familiar with al-Khidr, but the trouble is we don’t have any surviving pre-Islamic stories about him. The fact that we don’t know where he comes from annoys me, and so today I am going to look at some of his possible origins in ridiculous detail for all of you!!

His title may be some variant of the Arabic word for “green” (akhdir), in which case he would be “the green” or “the green one”, as in this hadith in which Mohammed says he sat on barren land and made green grass grow around him. But it’s unclear if Mohammed made up the name himself or got it from someone else and just made up that etymology--and again, he is given that title only in the hadith and not in the Quran itself. His “species” is also never mentioned--he is not said to be a man, angel, jinni, etc. Only one of Allah’s servants. Most believe he is, or was at one point, a man--possibly one who has gained immortality or just very long life somehow.

Early Muslim scholars didn’t know quite what to make of him. The historian al-Tabari believed that he originally “lived in the days of Afridhun the king, the son of Athfiyan” (the mythological Persian king Fereydun). He mentions that “others say he was over the vanguard of Dhu al-Qarnayn the Elder, who lived in the days of Abraham.” (Dhu al-Qarnayn is a figure based on myths of Alexander the Great and will be discussed later in this surah. By al-Tabari’s time, people realized that Alexander the Great was, in fact, a Greek polytheist and therefore the Quran’s assertion that Dhu al-Qarnayn was a Muslim is nonsensical, so they invented a hypothetical “Dhu al-Qarnayn the Elder” instead.)

I should mention that al-Tabari himself was Persian, so the links to Persian tales were likely based on him perceiving some similarity between al-Khidr and Persian stories related to the fountain of youth that he’d heard since childhood. There is no actual Persian tale, as far as anyone knows, bearing much in common with the story of al-Khidr.

Al-Tabari records another opinion that suggests that al-Khidr "was the offspring of a man who believed in Abraham ... emigrating with him from Babylon,” while yet another account tries to reconcile all of the above by saying that Dhu al-Qarnayn was Afridhun, who lived at the same time as Abraham, and al-Khidr served him and “drank the water of life” to become immortal. Another account says that he was friends with the prophet Elijah.

He lists even more, increasingly implausible opinions after that. In any case, what’s clear here is that none of the early Muslims knew who this guy was supposed to be. Some of the opinions take al-Khidr in a Persian direction while others keep him in the realm of Jewish figures like Elijah or Jeremiah. And beyond what’s written in the Quran and the hadith I quoted in the last section, we have little to go off of, which has made it difficult to determine the origins of of the story. If you’ve been reading these sections, you know that 90% of the time, we can clearly identify or at least reasonably guess where Mohammed got his tales from. Not this time.

Some scholars have speculated that the story was one of Mohammed’s own creations, pieced together from several different stories. They have noted a similarity between the story of al-Khidr meeting Moses and the story of Gilgamesh meeting Utnapishtim in the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh, which several Biblical stories, including the story of Noah’s Ark, are based upon. Utnapishtim, “the Far Away”, is the figure Noah was based upon and gains immortality after the flood; Gilgamesh seeks him out after the death of his friend Enkidu. He finds him at the “mouth of the rivers”. While there are clear parallels here (the mouth of the rivers, the long-living, once-human wise man), there are also clear differences (Gilgamesh seeks immortality, the lack of the “moral challenges” found in the al-Khidr story). I also find it seriously hard to believe that Mohammed had ever read/heard the Epic of Gilgamesh, let alone based an original story on it. It doesn’t fit his style at all. It’s totally possible that elements of the story influenced another story, which Mohammed based al-Khidr on... but that still means we don’t know what story he based him on!

As a side note, another story that is often invoked by some scholars is the tale of the (apparently immortal) prophet Elijah and a rabbi named Joshua, which is quite similar to the al-Khidr story. But this story seems to post-date the Quran by centuries, not pre-date it. It appears to have been written by Jews living in North Africa, who presumably heard the al-Khidr story, plus the early Muslim speculation that he was somehow involved with Elijah, and adopted it as a legend. So that’s another dead end. (Also Elijah came centuries after Moses’ time so this would involve time travel, which would be weird even by the Quran’s standards.)

The final al-Tabari opinion mentioned above--that al-Khidr has some link to Alexander the Great, called Dhu al-Qarnayn in the Quran--seems to largely stem from the fact that the story of Dhu al-Qarnayn directly follows the story of al-Khidr in this surah (and we’ll talk about him in the next section). But the Quran treats the two stories as separate and al-Khidr does not interact with Dhu al-Qarnayn at all in the Quran. However, Ibn Ishaq’s biography of Mohammed records pre-Islamic poetry, supposedly from a Yemeni Jewish king, that says that Dhu al-Qarnayn "sought Knowledge true from a learned sage”, presumably al-Khidr or someone like him. It’s not at all certain that the poem is authentic, given the timeframe (>300 years between the king and Ibn Ishaq), and none of the surviving Alexander myths we have from the pre-Islamic era mention such a figure. It is entirely possible one existed! But none have survived. A dead end, again... almost.

There is a version of the Alexander myth that shares at least one feature with the al-Khidr story. A Syrian version, evidently the work of Jacob of Serugh (who also mentioned the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus), involves a dead fish being exposed to “the water of life” and swimming away, which is not really the same thing as the al-Khidr tale (though this water is mentioned in a reputable hadith) but it does have some obvious similarities.

Finally he [a cook] came to a fountain in which was the water of life, and he drew near to wash the fish in the water, and it came to life and escaped

So we can at least guess where this particular detail came from: either the Alexander story itself, or else someone incorporated that into another story and Mohammed got it from that story. This detail has not escaped notice by Muslim scholars: Ibn Kathir clearly connects the legend about the fish being touched by the “water of life” with the Quranic account. But there is still no al-Khidr-esque figure to be found in the Syrian legend, nor is there an obvious connection between Moses and the cook.

So after a review of all of the above, the closest we can come to identifying the source of al-Khidr as a person is Ibn Ishaq’s quotation of a Jewish king Tubba, who died 350 years or so before Ibn Ishaq was born, and whose supposed sayings are impossible to verify (and probably legendary). And the fish thing probably originated from some Greek->Syriac->Arabic pathway like the Seven Sleepers story. That’s all we’ve got. Time for another tactic.

Western authors have identified a possible precursor of the al-Khidr story in some parables found in pre-Islamic Byzantine manuscripts, and those manuscripts do contain many details that are similar to the Quran’s story. But the main characters of those tales are an unnamed angel and an unnamed man--not Moses. Perhaps a later, now-lost version of those stories changed it up and made the unnamed man into Moses. But if that’s the case.... who is al-Khidr supposed to be?! We’re still stuck here!

After reading a bunch of theories about al-Khidr’s origins, I think that a slightly more obscure one is more interesting. Here’s the catch: it does not rely on identifying any existing story, but instead a hypothetical lost text. Let me lay it out for you.

Our first clue is that most of this surah is from traditions popular among Syrian Christians, even if they originated with, or later made their way into, the stories of Arabs/other religious groups. This story is sandwiched between the Seven Sleepers tale and the Alexander story, both popular among Syrians. The second clue is in al-Khidr’s attributes. Even if we don’t have any identical story in Christian texts, we can still look for a very long-living, mystical, extremely wise man who seems to have divinely-given knowledge and imparts it unto prophets while carrying out a task assigned to him by God.

In Syrian Christian tradition, there is a man who fits this bill. His name is the deeply obscure priest-king of (Jeru?)Salem, Melchizedek. If you have never heard of him, I don’t blame you. His Biblical role is limited to the following passage in the Book of Genesis:

Then Melchizedek king of Salem brought out bread and wine. He was priest of God Most High, and he blessed Abra[ha]m, saying,

“Blessed be Abram by God Most High, Creator of heaven and earth. And praise be to God Most High, who delivered your enemies into your hand.”

Then Abram gave him a tenth of everything.

And this one in the Book of Psalms:

The LORD has sworn and will not change his mind: "You are a priest forever, in the order of Melchizedek."

But Jewish and early Christian tradition has given this minor character a vastly expanded role. We can see this in the Bible itself, in Paul’s letter to the Hebrews, which begins:

For this Melchisedech was king of Salem, priest of the most high God, who met Abraham returning from the slaughter of the kings, and blessed him: To whom also Abraham divided the tithes of all: who first indeed by interpretation, is king of justice: and then also king of Salem, that is, king of peace: Without father, without mother, without genealogy, having neither beginning of days nor end of life, but likened unto the Son of God, continueth a priest for ever. Now consider how great this man is, to whom also Abraham the patriarch gave tithes out of the principal things.

That could explain both the tradition of al-Khidr being immortal and the link to Abraham seen in some of al-Tabari’s collected opinions. (The Quran itself says that no human can be immortal, though Islamic tradition has always presented al-Khidr as very long-lived or actually immortal, regardless of what the Quran says.) Paul was not the one to inflate Melchizedek’s importance; the first-century AD Jewish philosopher Philo’s works also mention him as “the king of peace”, the literal embodiment of “reason”, and an “interpreter of the law”. Philo goes on to say this, with its first sentence perhaps explaining why Paul is mentioning Melchizedek in the context of Jesus:

Melchisedek shall bring forward wine instead of water, and shall give your souls to drink, and shall cheer them with unmixed wine, in order that they may be wholly occupied with a divine intoxication, more sober than sobriety itself. For reason is a priest, having, as its inheritance the true God, and entertaining lofty and sublime and magnificent ideas about him, “for he is the priest of the most high God.”

But before we return to Melchizedek, let’s look at the actual story of al-Khidr.

When we left off, Moses had just magically encountered him. In 18:66, Moses asks al-Khidr if he can follow him and learn from him. Al-Khidr doubts that Moses will be able to “bear with” him because he does not have enough knowledge. But Moses insists on going with him. So al-Khidr agrees to let Moses tag along, provided he doesn’t bother him.

The two of them board a ship (a hadith says that the crew recognized him as the “pious slave of Allah” but that isn’t said in the Quran itself--Mohammed probably told this story more than once and added extra details in a non-Quranic account). In 18:71, al-Khidr promptly begins removing planks from it. A confused Moses asks why he did that and put the boat’s owners at risk of drowning. Al-Khidr reminds him that he promised not to bother him. Moses apologizes and says he forgot and was just briefly alarmed.

They get off the boat and spot a young boy along the shore. Al-Khidr murders him (bad!, the rest is neutral so far). Moses is now horrified and protests. Al-Khidr rolls his eyes and says yet again that he knew Moses couldn’t bear with him. Moses apologizes again and they keep going.

In 18:77, they come to a town. They ask the townspeople for some food, but are rejected. Moses is presumably cringing in anticipation of what al-Khidr will do... but all he does is fix a crumbling wall (in the hadith, he does it magically). Then he turns to Moses and says he will answer his questions now.

He says the boat would have been seized by a cruel king (in the hadith called “Hudad bin Budad”, presumably Hadad ben Badad, the Biblical king of Edom) and used for his nefarious purposes if he hadn’t damaged it.

And as for the lad, his parents were believers and we feared lest he should oppress them by rebellion and disbelief. So we intended that their Lord should substitute for them one better than him in purity and nearer to mercy.

😑

The wall was protecting a treasure left by a righteous man for his children. If the wall had crumbled, the greedy townspeople would have found it. That’s good, the poor dead kid is bad, the rest is neutral. And that’s the end of our odd story. Al-Khidr is never mentioned again.

Okay. That was weird as fuck, but let’s try to make sense of all this.

Now that we’ve read that, four things are apparent. One, al-Khidr is not a normal human; something about him is clearly mystical. Two, al-Khidr somehow knows the future. Three, he is working as an agent of Allah, not simply walking around doing this stuff on his own. Four, the point of the story is that it made sense to do those bad things because he knew that doing so would prevent even worse things from happening. It’s brutal but logical reasoning. And a fifth: Moses had to travel to a certain spot to meet him, had an intense experience with him, and then evidently never saw him again.

So let’s go back to Paul’s letter. Melchizedek meets a prophet and is so revered that this prophet honors him. He is the “king of justice” and is immortal--he is “a priest forever”. Philo connects him with the concept of “reason” itself. Sounds vaguely familiar, no? But how did this minor character gain such a role?

Philo was also not the first to give Melchizedek such importance. We don’t know who was the first, or how the hell this happened, but it was clearly part of Jewish tradition. In one of the Dead Sea Scrolls, dated to at latest the first century BC, Melchizedek is presented as a messianic figure and a judge. He will “release them from the debt of all their sins”, and “will judge Elohim's (God’s) holy ones and so establish a righteous kingdom”. Melchizedek will “thoroughly prosecute the vengeance required by Elohim's statutes. Also, he will deliver all the captives from the power of Belial (Satan basically), and from the power of all the spirits destined to him.”

So from at least 100 BC onwards, there has been a clear tradition of Melchizedek being a uniquely important figure, entrusted with some great task by God/Allah up to the end of the world. By the first century AD, we see him as an eternal priest, a mentor to prophets, and perhaps the greatest man to ever exist.

While this guy is almost totally forgotten now, it seems the legends of Melchizedek continued for quite some time, as he also shows up in the Nag Hammadi Gnostic texts written in the 200s-300s AD, seemingly based on Paul’s letter. Let me show some of it to you:

When he came, he caused me to be raised up from ignorance, and (from) the fructification of death to life. For I have a name: I am Melchizedek, the Priest of God Most High; I know that it is I who am truly the image of the true High-Priest of God Most High

A longer discussion of this text is here but the three important things to note here are 1) it’s extremely fragmentary and much of it has been lost, 2) Melchizedek is no longer referred to as a literal king at all, and so he is almost totally divorced from his original Biblical self, and 3) it seems to, if not equate Melchizedek with Jesus, then at least imply they are somehow linked. Now Melchizedek isn’t only similar to Jesus, as he was in Paul’s letter, but he is somehow part of him/an image of him/something (the fragmentary nature of the text makes it unclear). And so we have this minor Biblical character appearing in the story of at least two of the prophets later appropriated by Islam, Abraham and Jesus.

Other Egyptian texts mention Melchizedek; I won’t go into them because they don’t directly apply (read here if you would like) but I’m just noting that this guy stuck around for quite a while.

And the strange adventures of Melchizedek don’t end there. Getting into stuff that is possibly relevant to where Mohammed got this story, there is an apocryphal Syrian Christian text called the Cave of Treasures (based on a text from the 4th century but probably written in the 5th or 6th--around the same time as Jacob of Serugh was writing his homilies. It’s likely these stories were still kicking around during Mohammed’s lifetime. More on the history of scholarship of this text here). There are various stories within this collection, but I’d like to direct your attention to one in particular. In a story called the “Death of Noah”, there is a story of a dying Noah commanding the relocation of the corpse of Adam (which he’d brought into the ark) to a cross-shaped grave in Golgotha, which is where Jesus would later be crucified. It says:

And Noah lived three hundred and fifty years after he came forth from the Ark. And when he was sick unto death, ... said unto [his son Shem] privily, "... When I am dead, go into the Ark, wherein thou hast been saved, and bring out the body of our father Adam ... take with thee Melchisedek, the son of Mâlâkh, because him hath God chosen from among all your descendants that he may minister before Him in respect of the body of our father Adam.

...

And Shem said unto Melchisedek, "Thou shalt be the priest of the Most High God, because thou alone hath God chosen to minister before Him in this place. And thou shalt sit (i.e. dwell) here continually, and shalt not depart from this place all the days of thy life."

Noah instructs his son to bring Melchizedek along with him in this task, because he has been chosen by God for it. And once he is there, is told that he must remain there. (The author of this text, whoever he is, disagrees with Paul’s letter that Melchizedek had no mother or father. He says that his parents were simply never recorded, but that Melchizedek nonetheless is, or at least was once, a man like any other who has simply been chosen by God and given eternal or very, very long life.) Another apocryphal text of uncertain origin also connects Melchizedek to Noah in a different story.

The next chapter of the Cave of Treasures has him re-appearing ages later in the time of Abraham. His immensely high standing with God is made evident; after Abraham travels to meet him after being “called” by the “agency of God”, he falls upon his knees before him and is blessed by him, with God blessing Abraham in return.

And when he returned from the battle of the kings, the agency of God called him, and he crossed the mountain of Yâbhôs (evidently Jerusalem), and Melchisedek, the king of Shâlîm, the priest of the Most High God, went forth to meet him. And when Abraham saw Melchisedek, he made haste and fell upon his face, and did homage to him, and he rose up from the ground and embraced him, and kissed him, and was blessed by him ... after Melchisedek had blessed him, and made him to participate in the Holy Mysteries, God spake unto Abraham, and said unto him, "Thy reward is exceedingly great. Since Melchisedek hath blessed thee, and hath made thee to partake of bread and wine [with him], I also will assuredly bless thee, and I will assuredly multiply thy seed."

Later, after Isaac is born, Abraham takes him to meet Melchizedek (“Isaac was thirteen years old when his father took him and went up to the mountain of Yâbhôs to Melchisedek”). It’s also mentioned that this is the site where David later saw the angel with a sword. Further down, he also gets involved in the Jacob/Esau story and predicts their fates!

Rebecca became [pregnant] ... she went to Melchisedek, and he prayed over her and said unto her, "Two nations are in thy womb ... One nation shall be stronger than the other, and the elder shall be in subjection to the younger, that is to say, Esau shall be in subjection to Jacob."

But regarding Melchizedek himself, the book continues:

And in that same year in which Abraham offered up his son as an offering, ... Melchisedek having appeared and shown himself to men, the kings of the nations heard his history, and they gathered together and came unto him.

Still alive, Melchizedek is regarded as a great, wise man (titled the “father of kings”) and allowed to appear to and talk to people, rather than just stay in isolation in Adam's grave, but he still cannot leave the general spot where he has been commanded to stay--so they build a city for him there. The city of Jeru(salem), in fact.

"Verily, he is the king of the whole earth, and the father of all kings." And they built him a city and made Melchisedek to live in it; and Melchisedek called the name thereof "Jerusalem." ... And Melchisedek was held in honour by all, and he was called the "Father of Kings."

So Melchizedek worked his way into tales about Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Jesus (and Adam and David, in a way) at the absolute minimum, with many of those tales being fragmentary and partially lost. No doubt that someone, somewhere, expanded upon them in lost texts or oral variants. What are the odds that there was a now totally-lost tale in which he appeared to Moses? I’d say pretty damn good! It’s possible that Mohammed put his own spin on it (that part where the little kid was murdered because he’d have grown up to be a disbeliever has Mo’s hands all over it) but I believe it’s possible that the basis of the story is a now-lost Syrian tradition about Melchizedek.

In this hypothetical original story, Melchizedek may have been presented as a sort of guide, once but no longer fully human, who acts on God’s behalf and carries out his will forever, because he alone is wise enough to do it. The part about God/Allah informing Moses that someone existed who was more knowledgeable than he was, and likely the general theme of al-Khidr doing strange things that end up (supposedly...) “good” due to foresight, might have been straight from this lost tale. This lost tale may have been based on the Byzantine manuscript about the unnamed angel and incorporated an element of Jacob of Serguh’s Alexander story, the fish thing. Christian apocryphal writers did love to create mashups. I think that’s pretty solid conjecture! But...

The part about finding al-Khidr only “where the two seas meet” (or majmaa baynihima, a vague term usually translated as the “junction between” the seas or something. Some also translate it as “rivers” because it would make more sense, but “rivers” is anharu in the Quran) has never been explained. And it’s hard to fit it into our crackpot theory. Yes, Melchizedek is usually found in one particular spot (and Jerusalem is between two seas, physically, but Moses wouldn’t be walking in that area...), but what seas are we talking about here and where even is Moses during this story? Is it closer to the beginning or end of his journey? Are we in Egypt or somewhere else? It doesn’t say. Some tafsir authors think it means where the Mediterranean “meets” the Persian Gulf in the “east”, but... uh... they don’t do that anywhere.

Some modern-day scholars prefer to locate it at the tip of the Sinai Peninsula where the Gulf of Aqaba and the Gulf of Suez “meet” at a site called Ras Mohammed. Of course, they don’t actually “meet” anywhere, they just both... open into the sea, which they are gulfs of, and Ras Mohammed is a piece of land between them (as is Sinai as a whole). That’s quite far out of the way of the route that the Israelites supposedly took, and I don’t think it satisfactorily describes “where the seas meet”, which has always been historically interpreted as a specific water feature linking two seas, not just land. It also doesn’t explain the hadith’s mention of the king of Edom, nor its description of Moses and al-Khidr taking a boat from one side of the sea to the other.

Given the proposed route of Exodus and the reference to the king of Edom in that hadith, I think at least one of the seas in question is more likely the Dead Sea. Given that the Dead Sea has two basins, one of which is almost totally dried up today, maybe “where the two seas meet” could have been construed as the narrower region between the northern and southern basins? Or, going by the “rivers” translation, the place where the sea’s major river, the Arnon (Wadi el-Mujib in Jordan) branches into two? I dunno, people, it makes more sense than “where the Mediterranean and Gulf meets” or “actually it’s a piece of land” to me.

The Bible says that Moses died on the Jordanian side of the Dead Sea, to its northeast, at a place called Mount Nebo (in a hadith it’s just said to be close to the Promised Land). So this story would probably have happened somewhere south of that, which makes sense! The sea that Moses and al-Khidr would’ve traveled over in that case is the Dead Sea itself, into the Promised Land... which would be a change from the Biblical account, since Moses never stepped foot in Israel there. In this hypothetical story, al-Khidr would’ve shepherded Moses across the water--possibly to or near the future Jerusalem, which is on the other side--but he’d have to go back to his people afterwards, and never see it again.

It’s also possible that it’s meant to be the Jordan River (between the Sea of Galilee and the Dead Sea), but that wouldn’t really... make sense given the supposed path of the Hebrews. It’s too far north. Not that any of this story makes sense, but w/e, we’re trying to make a theory work here, ppl!!!

Any of this is a stretch bc it’d mean that God/Allah would have allowed Melchizedek to travel a bit further than in the stories in the Cave of Treasures. I guess in the story that exists only in my mind, God would have allowed him to travel into the Dead Sea, but not past it. The hadith says that the sailors knew who he was, so it seems like he lived in the general area, possibly in Jerusalem, but traveled around Israel? I dunno! I’m prolly thinking about this too hard and whatever story Mohammed based this on just pulled from the “mouth of the rivers” thing from the Epic of Gilgamesh without specifying where it was.

At any rate, we know that odd stories about Melchizedek getting inserted into the stories of various prophets existed at Mohammed’s time. We also know that they continued to exist for centuries. Many of the Cave of Treasures’ stories were reworked and published again in a 13th century by Iraqi bishop, again written in Syriac. This book is titled the Book of the Bee, and the relevant chapter is here. The details are largely the same as in the source text.

Let’s bring this back to the topic of Islam. If this is going even remotely in the right direction, we should see some historians at least speculating about a connection between al-Khidr and Melchizedek, even if they do not mention Melchizedek directly (many Quranic scholars absolutely refused to mention Christian or Jewish apocryphal texts even when it was obviously where a story came from, something that we will see with Dhu al-Qarnayn). They knew of other myths, clearly, and connected many of them to al-Khidr. Let's take a look at a scholar from Syria itself. If anyone would have connected the two, it would have been someone from the area, right?

Our bud Ibn Kathir happens to fit the bill, as he was from Arab Syria in the 1300s. Let’s see if we got anything here.... in his Stories of the Prophets, he says (jank-ass translation courtesy of myself bc I can’t find a good one in English, Arabic original here or read the full book in Arabic in this long PDF; this is on page 315):

He [Abu Hatim al-Sijistani (9th century Iraqi scholar)] said: “Ibn Ishaq said that Adam, when he was about to die, told his sons that the (great) flood would happen in the future. He instructed them to carry his body with them in the ark and then bury him in an appointed place later. They carried his body with them (in the ark), and when they came down (from the mountain), Noah ordered his sons to take Adam's body and bury him where he had indicated he wanted to be buried. And he [al-Sijistani] said: Adam had asked Allah to let whoever buried him live a very long time. So they (the sons) went to that place (the ark). His body was still there, and al-Khidr was the one to bury him (in the new burial spot). Allah fulfilled his promise (to Adam). He lives as long as Allah wishes him to live.”

Then he adds:

Ibn Qutaiba (9th century Iraqi scholar) said (in his work Al-Maarif, PDF here) that according to Wahab bin Munibah (8th century Yemeni scholar): “The name of al-Khidr is Balya ibn Malakan ibn Falag ibn Umar ibn Shalekh ibn Arfakhshad bin Sam bin Noah”

This is quite clearly the Melchidezek story from the Cave of Treasures in the first passage. Also hey, it’s our friend Ibn Ishaq! But this isn’t in the biography I’ve sometimes been quoting from, so what gives? Well... funny story, when Ibn Hisham was editing Ibn Ishaq’s work (all the copies of his original work are lost now, we know they survived into the 11th century but no one knows what happened to them), he decided to only focus on half of it. The half mainly concerning the life of Mohammed. There was another half that was basically a summary of history according to Islam, starting with creation and then going all the way through Biblical/Quranic history until he got to Mohammed. We only have fragments from it now, but this story was evidently in there. To remind you, Ibn Ishaq compiled his work barely a century after the death of Mohammed--he is one of the earliest Islamic historians. So even in the 700s, one of the many theories on the origin of al-Khidr connected him to Melchizedek in the Cave of Treasures.

And his opinion on this matter reached the 9th century Iraqi scholars mentioned, and Ibn Kathir himself centuries later. It’s unclear any of them knew the actual source of this tale, as none mention Melchidezek’s name and the whole superhuman-Melchizedek thing seems to have been rarely commented upon by Muslim scholars, if any were even aware of it.

Regarding the second passage, Melchizedek’s father Malakh is listed as the descendant of Noah’s son Shem’s (Sam’s) son Arphaxar (Arfakhshad) in the Cave of Treasures story. Malakh himself isn’t even a Biblical character, so that tidbit also seems pretty clearly related to the Syriac tale. Don’t ask where “Balya” came from because no one knows. It’s probably an Arabized form of some foreign word, maybe Syriac/Aramaic or Hebrew or even Greek. Some Western writers think it’s a written corruption of Ilyas/Elijah (إيليا), although I doubt that very much, as Eljiah’s name was well-known and the opinions mentioned above obviously weren’t implying that “Balya” is Elijah. And no, there’s no word like “balya” or “palya” (Arabic doesn’t have a p sound) meaning “green” in any language, so that’s not where the title al-Khidr comes from.

Wahab bin Munibah himself was deeply familiar with Jewish tradition and may have been from a family of Yemeni Jewish origin himself, one of the many prodded into “embracing Islam” during Mohammed’s lifetime, so the Cave of Treasures story of Melchizedek was apparently known by Jews as far south as Yemen too despite its Christian origins--and it’s not hard to imagine that other tales connected to that one were transmitted from Christians to Jews in the same way. There was a city called Najran near what is now the Yemen-Saudi Arabia border that had a Christian majority and Jewish minority prior to being depopulated in Umar’s time, so Arab Christians and Jews did live together in some places that far south. Perhaps that helps explain how the Jewish rabbis of Yathrib/Medina (maybe) came to know about al-Khidr.

We can at least clearly say that some of the many opinions on the origin of al-Khidr from the 700s to the 1300s connected him to Melchizedek, meaning we’re not totally insane here. They saw a connection too. Again, this is not meant to imply that al-Khidr is for sure based on a lost Melchizedek story. But I think that all of the above shapes up into a solid theory.

I mean... al-Khidr could be Elijah and/or a friend of Elijah who was also Jeremiah who served Alexander the Great who was actually a Persian king who lived in the time of Abraham who became immortal. I simply present this theory to you as the strongest of the ones I’ve come across.

Now that you have learned way more about an extremely minor Biblical character than you ever wanted to, the section is over. I’ll stop yelling at you about Melchizedek and you can go home now.

NEXT TIME: Alexander the Great, except he has horns on his head and is Muslim.

The Quran Read-Along: Day 104

Ayat: 17

Good: 1 (18:82)

Neutral: 13 (18:66-73, 18:75-79)

Bad: 3 (18:74, 18:80-81)

Kuffar hell counter: 0

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