Fascinating article by Sean Anthony on a particular philological crux that I had never seen before:
https://www.academia.edu/1119373/_Further_Notes_on_the_Word_%E1%B9%A2ibgha_in_Qur%CA%BEan_2_138_Journal_of_Semitic_Studies_59.1_Spring_2014_117-129Ultimately, however, I think Sean fails to convince. He argues that the 2:138 term "sibgha" of "Allah" should be interpreted as "dye," i.e. "dye of Allah," and that "dye" should be understood as a Late Antique trope for the effect of Christian baptism. In other words, he wants to assume the traditional literal Arabic reading is adequate, and is being used in a sophisticated metaphorical sense that plays on prevailing Late Antique metaphors about baptism.
But this is not linguistically satisfying. I think it is of critical importance to emphasize, as Sean does not address anywhere in the article, that the hapax legomen "sibgha" in 2:138 is shortly preceded by 2:135, a famous hanif verse. The term sibgha is being associated with Abraham and the pre-Christian/Jewish pure religion of Allah, the exact same context that 2:135 is arguing about using the (surely) theologically related terms hanif/milla. *And the orthography and language of 2:135 is mangled in its Classical Arabic transcription*. This is arguably one of Luxenberg's greatest successes, to show the Syriac grammatical and semantic structure behind the "hanif" term in 2:135, showing that an *emphatic Syriac epithet was mistranscribed in the Classical Arabic as if it were an accusative Arabic noun*. See pp. 47-48 of the following article, in which King discusses Luxenberg's thesis on this point.
http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/share/research/centres/clarc/jlarc/contents/King%20A%20Christian%20Qur%27an.pdfNow, if we take it that Luxenberg is right about the mangled Syriac substrate of 2:135 (which I do), it is perfectly reasonable to assume that 2:138 of the standard Qur'anic text, which is part of the same textual unit, suffers from similar problems in transcribing a term which is similarly *about the religion of Abraham*, in parallel with 2:135's use of "hanif." Contrary to Sean's presumption against textual problems, the text is plainly defective here, and the opposite presumption holds. It's clear that these particular verses were retranscribed and compiled by later individuals who *no longer adequately understood the peculiar grammar, terminology, and orthography they were dealing with*. The linguistic problems with 2:138 must be read alongside the linguistic problems with 2:135, which they parallel, and a satisfactory solution must be found for the entire unit of text.
And on that front Sean's article helpfully discusses how prior generations of scholars have dealt with those problems from a linguistic/philological perspective. Following those scholars, to my mind, it's much easier to believe that the text has been mangled (as Bellamy and others had concluded), and that the term is either a Syriac calque or a mistranscription, than to accept Sean's relatively unconvincing (to my mind) arguments about its relationship to metaphors of baptism as 'dye.'
Now, a fascinating subject would be this: Who were these late individuals who had trouble transcribing the text, and why did they have such trouble? Clearly a more Syriac-laden base text was being adopted and retranscribed in a different 'pure Arabic' context, at a time when the orthographic conventions and lexicon of the base text had become unclear and confusing. Why? What was the historical context here? Inquiring minds wish to know.
Topic: Qur'anic studies today