The people of the Thicket: Evidence for multiple scribes of a single Archetypal Quranic Text

The Quran speaks in multiple places about a ʔaṣḥābu l-ʔaykah 'Companions of the Wood/Thicket', a people associated with the prophet Šuʕayb, traditionally taken to be the same person as the Biblical Jethro.

The name ʔaṣḥābu l-ʔaykah is usually considered to consist of ʔaṣḥāb 'companions', + the definite article l followed by ʔaykah, a unity noun of ʔayk which means 'a collection of trees'. What exactly this refers to is not completely clear,[1] what is clear however is that there are two rather surprisingly different spellings of this phrase.

اصحب الايكه <ʔṣḥb ʔlʔykh> (Q15:78; Q50:14)
اصحب ليكه <ʔṣḥb lykh> (Q26:176; Q38:13)

The first spelling, is essentially what we would expect ʔaṣḥābu l-ʔaykah 'The companions of the Thicket' to be written as, whereas the second spelling is truly bizarre, and does not motivate such a reading at all within Quranic orthography, instead it looks rather like ʔaṣḥābu Laykah 'the companions of Laykah', where Laykah would be a (place) name.

This second interpretation, is in fact what we find in many of the reading traditions. In these reading traditions اصحب الايكه <ʔṣḥb ʔlʔykh> is read as ʔaṣḥābu l-ʔaykati 'The companions of the thicket', whereas اصحب ليكه <ʔṣḥb lykh> is read as ʔaṣḥāb laykata 'the companions of Laykah'.

Note that in the reading traditions that read it as Laykah, the noun is inflected as a diptote, the grammatical category that one would expect of a place name like this (Makkah is also a diptote, for example). Interpreters take the reading Laykah as a village located in the area of Al-ʔaykah.

What is worth appreciating here, however, is that in Quranic Arabic these two words would have been pronounced identically due to the loss of the Hamza.[2] Namely as [ʔaṣḥābu laykah].

We then have two variant spellings - one of which makes very little sense in the Quranic orthography - clearly referring to the same group of people. How can we understand this?

It is worth mentioning that ʔaykah as a word is completely isolated in Arabic, and there do not seem to be any other roots related to it and in use it seems entirely isolated to its use in the Quran (if anyone knows any use of it where it is obvioulsy not referring to the Quran, please let me know).

So even if the word existed outside of the Quranic text, it is certainly a rare word, and it is not obvious that a Quranic scribe who would have been familiar with it. This possible unfamiliarity with the word seems to be the origin of the two possible spellings. Confronted with a pronunciation [ʔaṣḥābu laykah], the scribe had to parse the unfamiliar word [laykah] in some way. Phonetically, the analysis Laykah and al-Aykah would be equally possible in this context.It seems then that we are dealing with two different scribes, one of which analysed it as the former and spelled it اصحب ليكه <ʔṣḥb lykh> while the other analysed it as the latter and spelled it اصحب الايكه <ʔṣḥb ʔlʔykh>.

This is significant, as it lets us say two things about the compilation of the Quranic text:

1. When it was put down to writing, the Quran was certainly being recited without the Hamza, as otherwise these two analyses could not have arisen (in fact, Warš does read both without hamza, making them homophones except in the case vowel).

2. There must have been at least two scribes that wrote different parts of the Quran, as it seems difficult to imagine how a single scribe would one time interpret [ʔaṣḥābu laykah] as one thing, and the other time as the other.

These conclusions do imply a single archetype of the Quran, from which the Cairo edition stems, and most other Quranic manuscript. This is the traditional narrative, and it can also be justified philologically.

Even though there is some amount of spelling variation between different early Quranic manuscripts, there are very specific idiosyncrasies in the spelling, shared by every single one of the early Quranic manuscripts. For example, the feminine ending -at- which is normally written ـه <-h>, is occasionally written with a ـت <-t> in the Quranic text. This happens in a few instances in the Quran, which I've discussed earlier. The variation between the <-h> and <-t> is clearly optional, and carries no meaning. If scribes were not working from a single archetype, we would not at all expect there to be significant amounts of agreement between the modern Cairo edition, and early Quranic documents, but that is exactly what we find.

For example for niʕmat- in construct is written with <-t>. If one of the mentioned manuscripts is not mentioned in one of these Aya's, this does not mean a difference in spelling, but absence of that Aya in the manuscript.

Q2:231 Sam [4]; WeII [5]
Q3:103 CPP[3]; WeII
Q5:11 CPP; WeII
Q14:28 CPP; WeII
Q14:34 CPP; WeII
Q16:72 Sam; WeII
Q16:83 Sam; WeII
Q16:114 Sam; WeII
Q31:31 MaVI [6]
Q35:3 WeII; MaVI
Q52:29 WeII

A proper examination of this claim would of course also require us to look at niʕmat- in construct written with <-h>, and over more manuscripts. But this remarkable correspondence, is already so clear, that any attempt to claim that there wasn't a written archetype is difficult to take seriously.

Considering how early these manuscripts date in Carbon Dating and paleography, it becomes quite likely that the Uthmanic (or earlier) compilation lies at the heart of all these documents.

A prediction of this claim of, 1. a single archetype and 2. at least two scribes of this archetype, is of course that the spellings of ليكه / الايكه are exactly the same as well across the early Quranic manuscripts:

الايكه
Q15:78 CPP; Sam; WeII; GK[7]
Q50:14 WeII; GK

ليكه
Q26:176 CPP; Sam; WeII; MaVI; GK
Q38:13 Sam; GK; (WeII)

WeII actually has اليكه <ʔlykh> for Q38:13 , with a very lopsided ا <ʔ>, no doubt the start of a لا <lʔ>, which was interrupted as the scribe realised he was accidentally writing الايكه while this Ayah requires the ليكه spelling.

As you can see, the prediction bears out.

Therefore, I conclude:

1. The language of the Quran lost the hamza (as evidenced in rhyme, and orthography)
2. The analysis of [ʔaṣḥābu laykah] is ambiguous.
3. Two different interpretations are found in the Quran ʔaṣḥābu l-ʔaykah and ʔaṣḥābu laykah
4. There must have been at least two scribes to understand these two interpretations.
5. There must be a single archetype of the Quran from which most -if not all- Quranic manuscripts stem.
6. There were, at least, two scribes that wrote the single archetypeof the Quran.

It is hoped that this short discussion motivates other scholars to find more evidence for these orthographic "hands" in the Quran. They may give us a better understanding of the compilation of the Quranic archetype.

[1] Nawas, John, “People of the Thicket”, in: Encyclopaedia of the Qurʾān, General Editor: Jane Dammen McAuliffe, Georgetown University, Washington DC. Consulted online on 24 May 2017 <http://dx.doi.org.ezproxy.leidenuniv.nl:2048/10.1163/1875-3922_q3_EQSIM_00324>

[2] I write on this in an older blog post. I don't fully agree with the finding in this post anymore however. I will give a talk coming North-Atlantic Conference for Afroasiatic Linguistics on the Hamza in the Quran. I think it is safe to say now that the *ʔ was lost basically everwhere. There is some ambiguity in word-final position however.

[3] Déroche, F. (2009) La transmission écrite du Coran dans les débuts de l'islam. Le codex Parisino-petropolitanus. Leiden & Boston: Brill.

[4] Samarkand codex

[5] Wetzstein II 1913

[6] MA VI 165

[7] Großer Korankodex

Comments

[David Marjanović]

Are you sure that the same scribe would reliably write the same word the same way every time, especially an unfamiliar word?

[PhoeniX]

That's an excellent question. I had not really considered that option.

My feeling is that that would not be the most obvious solution, but seems difficult to completely exclude as a possibility.

One argument I think one could make is that, in the order that the Surahs are now (which I think is fair to assume is the order in which the Archetypal Quran was written down), you find throughout the text: al-Aykah, Laykah, Laykah, al-Aykah.

Assuming the scribe wrote the manuscript in this order, one can imagine them first writing it as al-Aykah, and then making up their mind and switching to Laykah. But then switching back to al-Aykah again for its final attestation would then be a little unusual.

Incidentally, I hadn't thought of this analogy yet: This mistake is essentially equivalent to what we find in some German/Dutch/English misparsings of the indefinite article like:

Dutch: een adder < *een nadder
Belgian Dutch: een nonkel < *een onkel

One interpretation takes the definite article as the start of the next word, the other interpretation takes it as the definite article, and assume the word starts with a vowel.

It's a little hard to say which of the two was original, although if the intepretation is correct that Laykah comes from Leuke Kome (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leuke_Kome), than the al-aykah interpretation is the reanalysis.

[Albert]

I was thinking of a greek word as well. Your idea of Leuke Komé is interesting.
One question : in what reading traditions do we find the اصحب ليكه <ʔṣḥb lykh> reading ? Otherwise, that "Interpreters take the reading Laykah as a village located in the area of Al-ʔaykah." shows that they felt obliged to say something whereas they know nothing about what they are talking about. To sum up, they have no idea at all what these words means. Their attitudes toward the quranic text is the same as ours : this attitute is to try to comprehend it. Like we do. But, the difference, is that we do not claim that the text comes from one of us, and that we have a very sure tradition which go to the producer of the text.It seems therefore logical that we have the attitude that we have. But them ?

[nashrah fatma]

how did they die?

[gazial]

thxx