Distortion of Isaiah 21:7 (A Proof Text for the Prophesy of Muhammad ﷺ)

 بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم

الصلاة والسلام عليك يا سيدي يا رسول الله

وعلى آلك واصحابك يا سيدي يا رسول الله

فداك ابي وامي يا رسول الله

In the Name of Allah, the Rahman, the Merciful

Allah سبحانه وتعالى says:

مِنَ الَّذِیۡنَ ہَادُوۡا یُحَرِّفُوۡنَ الۡکَلِمَ عَنۡ مَّوَاضِعِہٖ

Among the Jews are those who pervert words from their proper places

(Surah 4, Ayah 46)

I previously quoted Isaiah chapter 21, verse 7 a prophecy about the holy Prophet Muhammad صلى الله عليه وسلم who is described as the rider of the camel راكب الجمل

The Jewish scribes, known as the Masoretes, however, distorted the word “rider” in the singular and pluralized it to chariotry. The scholar John C. Reeves says: “evidence supplied by the extant Greek, Latin, Syriac, and Aramaic versions of this passage in Isaiah—textual recensions that predate the linguistic labors of the Masoretes upon biblical manuscripts—clearly demonstrates that those who were reading Isaiah in the pre-Masoretic age were pronouncing the consonantal skeleton רכב as rôkhev, “rider; one riding” (i.e., as if it were written רוכב), in the latter two of the three occurrences. That this participial reading was in fact the more primitive one for the Hebrew text of Isa 21:7 is confirmed by the graphic evidence supplied by the Qumran Isaiah Scroll (1QIsa^a), which has רוכב for רכב in both instances. These considerations suggest that the Muslim reading of the grammar of Isa 21:7 is not unusual at all; rather, it is in line with a normative understanding of the linguistic forms registered there in the centuries prior to the activity of the Masoretes.”

John C. Reeves goes on to say: “It is therefore of signal interest to note that there is at least one instance where it appears that this potentially compelling Muslim reading of a biblical text was adopted by a Jewish exegete, reformulated, and semantically subverted in order to generate a new insight into the imminence of the messianic age. A popular post-Muslim Jewish apocalypse introduced as the Nistarot or Secrets of R. Šim’ôn ben Yohai, a work whose contents span the rise and fall of the Umayyad caliphate, contains in what is arguably its most primitive redaction a suprisingly positive endorsement of the prophetic mission of Muhammad and an intriguing affirmation of the divinely mandated role of Islam in the deliverance of Israel from Byzantine rule...Finally, it is clear that the ‘judaized’ interpretation of Isa 21:7 advanced in the Nistarot, a work compiled from smaller complexes of apocalyptic traditions emanating from the mid-seventh to mid-eighth centuries CE, presumes, as do all the extant pre-Masoretic versions of this oracle, a ‘singular’ understanding of the animal riders; namely, one figure riding an ass and another figure riding a camel. Given the Islamicate cultural context for the bulk of Masoretic textual activity, it is tempting to argue that the inscribed vocalization of the key word רכב in its final two occurrences in Isa 21:7 as rekhev in place of the demonstrably older traditional reading rôkhev signals a conscious yet subtle polemical move on the part of the Masoretic enterprise. Even less subtle is the roughly Arabic ‘translation’ (tafsîr) of Isa 21:7 by R. Saadya Gaon, where the single ‘ass-rider’ and lone ‘camel-rider’ of the pre-Masoretic versions become ‘peoples (!) who are riders of asses and camels,’ a pluralizing rendition that effectively sabotages its prophetological import. Since Isa 21:6-7 had enjoyed some scholarly recognition even within some Jewish circles as a viable proof text for Islam’s divine mandate, it is not difficult to imagine later generations of textual critics seizing this opportunity to counter and subvert a culturally influential yet doctrinally ‘flawed’ textual reading.”

Reeves, J. C. (2005). Trajectories in near eastern apocalyptic: A postrabbinic jewish apocalypse reader. Society of Biblical Literature. (pages 9,10,12)