Quran and Prophet Zechariah's Pentateuch - A Historical Background

Historians believe that the Septuagint was written in the 3rd century BCE. This shows that the Pentateuch was a fixed text at least 200 years before Jesus. Despite the differences between the Samaritan Torah, the Septuagint, and the Masoretic texts, they do not contain major marginal differences that significantly affect the stories within the Pentateuch.

In this case, there is no reason to think that the Pentateuch read by Zechariah — who served for a long time as a priest in the Temple in Jerusalem, the center of mainstream Judaism, and who took Jesus’ mother Mary under his protection — included the story of the sacrificed child being Ishmael, omitted the story of Lot and his daughters, or lacked the account of Jacob wrestling with a divine being.

When the Quran narrates the stories of Mary’s mother, Mary, Zechariah, John (Yahya), and Jesus, we need to consider them within this kind of historical context. In these stories, which form a coherent narrative sequence set inside the Temple — far from the environment of a marginal Jewish sect — we must assume that the Quran takes for granted a text that was definitively fixed by the 3rd century BCE.