Adam said, ‘I shall do as this raven.’ Immediately (lit. out of hand) "he took Abel's corpse and dug in the earth and buried it."

When we compare the Jewish legend with the one given in the Qur'an, we see that the only difference is that in the former the raven taught Adam how to bury the body, whereas in the Qur'an it is Cain who is said to have been thus taught. It is clear also that the passage in the Qur'an is not a literal translation from one or more Jewish books, but is rather, as we might expect, a free reproduction of the story as told to Muhammad by some of his Jewish friends, of whom early Arabian accounts mention the names ¹ of several. This explains the mistake that the Qur'an makes in attributing the burial to Cain instead of to Adam. We shall notice similar phenomena throughout the whole series of these excerpts. It is hardly probable that these slight divergences were purposely made by Muhammad, though it is quite possible that the Jews who related the legends to him had learnt them orally themselves, and that they and not the Arabian prophet made the mistake. That is a matter of small moment. What is certain is that we can here, and in very many other instances, trace the account which Muhammad gives to earlier Jewish written sources.

What is recorded in the thirty-fifth verse of the Surah quoted above seems to have no immediate

relation to the preceding part of the passage. A link is evidently missing. If, however, we turn to Mishnah Sanhedrin (chapter iv. § 5), we find the whole matter fully stated, so that the connexion which exists between the verse above mentioned and the narrative of the murder of Abel becomes clear. For the Jewish commentator, in commenting on the words which the Pentateuch tells us God spoke to Cain, "What ¹ hast thou done? The voice of thy brother's blood crieth unto me front the ground;" — in which passage the word blood is in the plural in Hebrew because it denotes blood shed by violence, — writes thus: "Concerning Cain who slew his brother, we have found that it is said concerning him, ‘The voice of thy brother's bloods crieth.’ He saith not, ‘Thy brother's blood’ but ‘Thy brother's bloods,’ — his blood and the blood of his descendants. On this account was Adam created alone, to teach thee that everyone who destroyeth one soul out of Israel, the Scripture reckoneth it unto him as if he had destroyed the whole world; and everyone who preserveth alive one soul out of Israel, the Scripture reckoneth it unto him as if he had preserved alive the whole world." We are not concerned with the correctness or otherwise of this fanciful exposition of the sacred text, but it is of importance to notice that the thirty-fifth verse of Surah Al Maidah is an almost literal translation of part of this extract.