Tahrif and the Number of Prophet Jacob’s Descendants
Tahrif is an Arabic term meaning “distortion” or “alteration” as a concept spanning interfaith relations, textual history, and religious pluralism across Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. While commonly understood in polemical contexts as the intentional physical falsification of scripture (such as the Torah or Gospels) to hide prophecies or change texts. Accusations of textual corruption did not begin with Islam. For example, early rabbinic literature records Jewish charges of alteration against Samaritan scribes in the 2nd century C.E., and Mani (founder of the religion Manichaeism) accused existing scriptures of tahrif around the same era.
The “70 Faces of Torah” vs. Zero-Sum Thinking, contrasts rigid, zero-sum medieval philosophies—which viewed textual or interpretive variants as malicious lies—with the Jewish tradition that the Torah has “70 faces” (multiple valid interpretations) and that minor historical or textual variations are natural over centuries, rather than deliberate corruptions.
Dr. Itamar Kislev, a Senior Lecturer of Hebrew Bible and Medieval Jewish Exegesis at the University of Haifa offers us a good example of Tahrif that is found in the list of Jacob’s descendants. Genesis 46:8-27 lists Jacob’s descendants who came to Egypt; in the traditional Hebrew Masoretic Text (MT) as a total of 70, whereas in the Hebrew Bibles’s Greek translation the Septuagint (LXX), they total 75. In other words, the MT is missing five names found in the LXX. This variation of five names correlates with other references in the Torah.
According to the MT of Exodus 1:5, Jacob’s descendants number 70, whereas in two scrolls from Qumran and in the LXX, they number 75. The tradition of 75 is also found in the New Testament (Acts 7:14), and Philo of Alexandria (Egypt) a first century C.E. Jewish philosopher, uses the number 75 in one of his books.
To complicate matters further, these five extra names are found, or not found, in both the Hebrew and Greek text of Numbers 26. Which is the earlier tradition—70 or 75? And how did the one change to the other? These five extra names are descendants of Manasseh and Ephraim. In the MT Joseph’s descendants are only his two sons, Manasseh and Ephraim, whereas in the LXX his two sons have 5 descendants: Manasseh has a son (Machir) and a grandson (Gilead) and Ephraim has two sons (Sutalaam and Taam) and a grandson (Edem).
But which version is more original? And is either “the” original version? We will probably never know the answer to this question (only God knows); but this obvious example of Tahrif helps us to understand that the Tahrif the Qur’an is referring to is the Tahrif of unintentional text versions and not that of the conscious falsification for ideological reasons of the written text.
