Cutting and Binding: The Hebrew Brit and the Qurʾanic Mīthāq as a Shared Semitic Covenantal Grammar

Abstract

This essay reads the Hebrew brit (בְּרִית) and the Qurʾanic mīthāq (ميثاق) as functional counterparts within a shared Semitic religious-legal idiom of covenant—not as etymological cognates, which they are not, but as analogous instruments of solemn, binding pact-making between God and human communities and among those communities themselves. After tracing the semantic field of brit through its characteristic idiom kārat berît (“to cut a covenant”) and the major biblical covenants, and the Qurʾanic covenantal vocabulary of ʿahd and mīthāq culminating in the primordial covenant of Q 7:172, the essay takes the Constitution of Medina (Ṣaḥīfat al-Madīna) as its central case. It argues that this foundational Islamic legal document, in constituting a single umma while preserving the dīn of the Jewish parties to it, instantiates what the present author has elsewhere termed covenantal pluralism. Read against the grain of supersessionism, and in the balanced historiographical register established by Mark Cohen, the shared covenantal heritage of Jews and Muslims emerges as the deep grammar that underwrote centuries of creative intellectual and spiritual symbiosis. The aim is to recover covenant as an idiom of dialogue rather than competitive supersession, and to locate the conditions of medieval Jewish-Muslim flourishing in a common covenantal grammar present at the foundations of both traditions.