I compare Islam’s Tahrif to Midrash in Judaism

I am an American reform rabbi who frequently writes on interfaith dialogue, religious pluralism, and the historical connections between Judaism and Islam. My numerous articles are published across platforms like the Times of Israel Blogs, Islamicity and Eurasia Review. I address the Islamic concept of Tahrif (the distortion or alteration of sacred texts) from a unique Jewish perspective. My interpretation of Tahrif focuses on reconciling biblical textual history with Islamic theology through the following key arguments:

1. Meaning vs. Textual Falsification
I emphasize that the original Quranic verses mentioning Tahrif (such as Surah 2:75, 4:46, 5:13, and 5:41) do not explicitly state that Jews and Christians physically altered the written letters of their scriptures. Instead, they echo early classical Muslim commentators (like Al-Raghib al-Isfahani) who defined Tahrif as misinterpretation or taking words out of context. I argue that the concept of “physical textual corruption” (Tahrif al-lafzi) was popularized centuries later by medieval polemicists like Ibn Hazm.

2. Tahrif as a Tool for Religious Pluralism
Rather than viewing textual changes negatively, I argue that historical modifications or variant texts reflect Moses’s will for religious pluralism. I posit that as human history and languages evolve, religious texts naturally require dynamic interpretations. I compare the concept of Tahrif to Midrash in Judaism—the rabbinic tradition of plumbing multiple meanings from a single verse. In his view, having “70 faces of Torah” is an enlightening process rather than a malicious falsification called Tahrif.

3. Historical Pre-Islamic Context
I note that accusations of scripture corruption did not originate with Islam. I point out that pre-Islamic traditions actively engaged in these disputes. For example, 2nd-century Rabbinic Jews accused Samaritan scribes of falsifying the Samaritan Torah by intentionally adding phrases like “near Shechem”. Through this framing, I attempt to move the dialogue away from a “zero-sum games” where one scripture must be entirely false for another to be entirely true.

Instead I frame Judaism and Islam as synergistic monotheism which is the name of one of my books. Tahrif is an Arabic term meaning “distortion” or “alteration,” used in Islamic tradition to describe the belief that earlier divine revelations given to Jews and Christians were changed or corrupted over time.

Any religion that has inspired people for more than a few centuries will over the course of time develop variations in its perspectives and its insights. The major world religions, which span more than one civilization and one historical epoch, will all exhibit even more variation. Judaism gives evidence of this more explicitly than any other religion I know.

Even within Orthodox and traditional rabbinic thought there is not only lots of variety, but very frequently opposing statements are juxtaposed, as if to call our attention to the important concept that opposition due to seeing things differently is not a sin. For example, the concluding service on Yom Kippur-the Day of Atonement is called Ne’ilah (locking up).

In the Jerusalem Talmud there are two different opinions about what is being locked up at the end of our prayers. One says it refers to the gates of the Temple in Jerusalem. The other opinion is that it refers to the gates of heaven.

One of the most complex, controversial and misunderstood concepts in the Qur’an is Tahrif. The term Tahrif does not occur in the Quran, but there are four verses claiming that some people have tampered with the sacred texts (Qur’an 2:75; 4:46; 5:13; 5:41). The term Tahrif is also used to refer to Shi’a charges that parts of the Quran in which Ali’s authority is given divine sanction, have been removed.

Most Muslims today think that Tahrif implies Jews and Christians had in pre-Prophet Muhammad decades, consciously changed the written text of the Hebrew Bible and the Greek Gospels. But the earliest and most credible Tafsir scholars explicitly state that the written text of the Torah is intact, but Banu Yisrael misinterpreted it.

In the Qur’an tahrif is generally understood as a specific charge that previous religious communities, through actual textual alteration; or through false interpretation, specifically expunged references to the advent of Prophet Muhammad that were contained in the Hebrew Bible and the Greek Gospels.

In later centuries, especially after Ibn Hazm, tahrif was greatly expanded to raise doubts about everything in the both other scriptures and very few Muslims today have read either the Torah or the Gospels.

For example, the Torah (Genesis 22) narrates the dramatic account of Prophet Abraham’s bringing Prophet Isaac to Mount Moriah in order to sacrifice him, an act prevented only by the last-minute intervention of an angel messenger of Allah.

In Christian tradition, this narrative is known as “the sacrifice of Isaac, because most Christians theologians see Prophet Isaac’s experience as a prefiguration of the crucifixion of Prophet Jesus, even though Prophet Isaac was not sacrificed in the biblical narrative.

The Qur’an explains that Prophet Jesus was indeed not sacrificed because the crucifixion of Prophet Jesus did not occur; or if it did occur, another person who looked like Prophet Jesus was crucified.

In Jewish tradition, however, the story is referred to as Aqedat Yiṣhaq, “the binding of Isaac,” or in short, just the Aqedah, “the binding.” This derives from the central verse in the drama: “And they came to the place which God had told him, and Abraham built an altar there, and he arranged the wood; and he bound Isaac his son, and he placed him on the altar, on top of the wood.” (Genesis 22:9) The test was in the bounding, because Prophet Abraham knew God would never demand the killing of an innocent person.