Echoes of the extra books: what the Qur'an shares with 1 Enoch and Jubilees

The Qur’an assumes its audience already knows Noah, Abraham, Moses, and Mary, but it narrates their stories in a way that frequently presupposes material found outside the canonical Bible. Its closest narrative parallels are often not with Genesis or the Gospels themselves, but with Second Temple Jewish pseudepigrapha — especially 1 Enoch and the Book of Jubilees — traditions that circulated across the late antique Near East.

This is mainstream scholarship, not fringe speculation. Patricia Crone devotes a full study to it (“The Book of Watchers in the Qur’ān,” 2016), and Tommaso Tesei’s survey closes with this assessment:

“From the general (and incomplete) overview that I attempted to provide in this article it appears that stories, motifs, and possibly even books from the corpus of pseudepigraphical literature were known in the social and cultural context(s) from which the Qur’ān emerged.”

— Tesei, “Echoes of Pseudepigrapha in the Qur’ān,” 2020

What follows is a tour of the strongest parallels, each with the Quranic passage, the extra-biblical source, and the scholar who connected them. At the end we look honestly at what the evidence does not show, because that is where the argument gets interesting.

The books nobody canonised — except one church

A correction first, because the label matters: 1 Enoch and Jubilees are not “Gnostic Christian books.” They are Jewish works composed roughly in the third–first centuries BCE, before and around the New Testament era. They are “extra-biblical” in the sense that the universal church — East and West — never recognised them as canonical.

The exception is the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, which adopted both into its canon in Geʿez and is the only Christian tradition that preserved them complete. Every complete copy of 1 Enoch in the world is Ethiopian. That odd fact becomes evidence later, when we ask how this material reached the Qur’an’s environment.

The two key studies, both quoted throughout:

• Patricia Crone, “The Book of Watchers in the Qur’ān,” in The Qur’ānic Pagans and Related Matters, ed. Hanna Siurua, 3 vols (Leiden: Brill, 2016), vol. 1, pp. 183–218
• Tommaso Tesei, “Echoes of Pseudepigrapha in the Qur’ān,” in Carlos A. Segovia, Remapping Emergent Islam (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020), ch. 8

Two angels in Babylon

Qur’an 2:102 says a party of those given Scripture followed what devils recited over Solomon’s kingdom, and names two angels who taught sorcery in Babylon:

وَٱتَّبَعُوا۟ مَا تَتْلُوا۟ ٱلشَّيَـٰطِينُ عَلَىٰ مُلْكِ سُلَيْمَـٰنَ ۖ وَمَا كَفَرَ سُلَيْمَـٰنُ وَلَـٰكِنَّ ٱلشَّيَـٰطِينَ كَفَرُوا۟ يُعَلِّمُونَ ٱلنَّاسَ ٱلسِّحْرَ وَمَآ أُنزِلَ عَلَى ٱلْمَلَكَيْنِ بِبَابِلَ هَـٰرُوتَ وَمَـٰرُوتَ ۚ وَمَا يُعَلِّمَانِ مِنْ أَحَدٍ حَتَّىٰ يَقُولَآ إِنَّمَا نَحْنُ فِتْنَةٌ فَلَا تَكْفُرْ ۖ فَيَتَعَلَّمُونَ مِنْهُمَا مَا يُفَرِّقُونَ بِهِۦ بَيْنَ ٱلْمَرْءِ وَزَوْجِهِۦ ۚ وَمَا هُم بِضَآرِّينَ بِهِۦ مِنْ أَحَدٍ إِلَّا بِإِذْنِ ٱللَّهِ ۚ وَيَتَعَلَّمُونَ مَا يَضُرُّهُمْ وَلَا يَنفَعُهُمْ ۚ وَلَقَدْ عَلِمُوا۟ لَمَنِ ٱشْتَرَىٰهُ مَا لَهُۥ فِى ٱلْـَٔاخِرَةِ مِنْ خَلَـٰقٍ ۚ وَلَبِئْسَ مَا شَرَوْا۟ بِهِۦٓ أَنفُسَهُمْ ۚ لَوْ كَانُوا۟ يَعْلَمُونَ

“And follow that which the devils falsely related against the kingdom of Solomon. Solomon disbelieved not; but the devils disbelieved, teaching mankind magic and that which was revealed to the two angels in Babel, Harut and Marut. Nor did they (the two angels) teach it to anyone till they had said: We are only a temptation, therefore disbelieve not (in the guidance of Allah). And from these two (angles) people learn that by which they cause division between man and wife; but they injure thereby no-one save by Allah’s leave.”

— Qur’an 2:102 · Sūrat al-Baqarah · Pickthall

Nothing in the canonical Old Testament explains where two angels in Babylon teaching forbidden knowledge would come from. 1 Enoch does — in detail. The Watchers descend, lust after women, and teach humans the arts heaven withheld:

“And the angels, the children of the heaven, saw and lusted after them, and said to one another: ‘Come, let us choose us wives from among the children of men and beget us children.’”

— 1 Enoch 6:2 · trans. R. H. Charles · public domain

“And they were in all two hundred; who descended in the days of Jared on the summit of Mount Hermon, and they called it Mount Hermon, because they had sworn and bound themselves by mutual imprecations upon it.”

— 1 Enoch 6:6 · trans. R. H. Charles · public domain

“And Azâzêl taught men to make swords, and knives, and shields, and breastplates, and made known to them the metals of the earth and the art of working them… Semjâzâ taught enchantments, and root-cuttings, Armârôs the resolving of enchantments, Barâqîjâl, (taught) astrology, Kôkabêl the constellations.”

— 1 Enoch 8:1, 8:3 · trans. R. H. Charles · public domain

Three shared motifs, as catalogued by Tesei and Crone:

1. Angels involved in transmitting forbidden knowledge — in 1 Enoch the Watchers teach the “evil arts”; in the Qur’an two angels are connected to the teaching of sorcery.
2. Transgression of epistemological limits. Tesei: “a number of motifs from the fallen angels stories are easily discernible, the most evident being the transgression of epistemological limits in which angels are somehow involved.”
3. Jubilees 4:15 names the fallen angels “the Watchers” and links them to forbidden union; Jubilees 5:1–6 narrates their punishment.

The differences matter too. The Qur’an twice exonerates the angels — they warn every pupil, “We are only a temptation, therefore disbelieve not,” and harm none save by Allah’s leave. Q 2:102 also drops the central Enochic motif of illicit intercourse and the Giants. And the names Hārūt/Mārūt have no Enochic equivalent: scholars derive them from the Avestan deities Haurvatāt and Amərətāt, entering the story via Sasanian Iraq.

That mixture — Enochic storyline, Iranian names, angelic exculpation — is exactly what you would expect from a tradition circulating orally across several cultures rather than copied from one book. Crone treats the Book of Watchers as “reflected more than once in the Qur’an”; early exegetes such as al-Ṭabarī and al-Qurṭubī filled out the Qur’an’s allusion with the fuller Enochic story, a move the tradition itself later came to regret (more on that below).

The prophet raised to a high station

The Qur’an never names Enoch, but twice mentions Idrīs:

وَٱذْكُرْ فِى ٱلْكِتَـٰبِ إِدْرِيسَ ۚ إِنَّهُۥ كَانَ صِدِّيقًا نَّبِيًّا
وَرَفَعْنَـٰهُ مَكَانًا عَلِيًّا

“And make mention in the Scripture of Idris. Lo! he was a saint, a prophet; / And We raised him to high station.”

— Qur’an 19:56–57 · Sūrat Maryam · Pickthall

Compare Enoch’s assumption as the extra-biblical books describe it:

“And those three that had last come forth grasped me by my hand and took me up, away from the generations of the earth, and raised me up to a lofty place, and showed me a tower raised high above the earth.”

— 1 Enoch 87:3 · trans. R. H. Charles · public domain

“And he was moreover with the angels of God these six jubilees of years, and they showed him everything which is on earth and in the heavens, the rule of the sun, and he wrote down everything… And he was taken from amongst the children of men, and we conducted him into the Garden of Eden in majesty and honour.”

— Jubilees 4:21–23 · trans. R. H. Charles (1902) · public domain

John Reeves observes that “We raised him to a high position” (Q 19:57) echoes the descriptions of Enoch’s heavenly assumption in 1 Enoch 87:3 and Jubilees 4:23. Tesei agrees that “the most compelling argument” for identifying Idrīs with Enoch lies precisely in this presentation — “as someone who was raised to a high position,” echoing Enochic tradition. Crone accepts the identification while proposing a more elaborate derivation for the name itself, which Tesei judges “a bit of a stretch.”

The identification then travels into Islamic tradition on its own: al-Ṭabarī and al-Qurṭubī report that Idrīs “was the first to write with the pen,” and associate him with wisdom and the study of the stars — the profile of Enoch the scribe (“Enoch the scribe of righteousness,” 1 Enoch 12:3–4). Note carefully: that is tafsīr tradition, not a ḥadīth. The Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī Night Journey narration, however, does place Idrīs among the prophets Muhammad meets in the heavens:

“Abu Dhar added that the Prophet (ﷺ) met Adam, Idris, Moses, Jesus and Abraham, he (Abu Dhar) did not mention on which heaven they were but he mentioned that he (the Prophet) met Adam on the nearest heaven and Abraham on the sixth heaven.”

— Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī 349 · USC-MSA Vol. 1, Bk 8, No. 345

A prophet the Bible mentions only in a four-verse genealogy (Genesis 5:21–24), and the extra-biblical books elaborate into a heavenly visitor, shows up in the ṣaḥīḥ hadith corpus doing exactly what those books said he did.

The devil who asked for a reprieve

This is arguably the most distinctive Jubilees–Qur’an parallel, because the narrative device is otherwise unattested.

After refusing to bow to Adam, Iblīs petitions God for respite to tempt mankind until the Day of Resurrection — and the petition is granted (Qur’an 7:14–18; 15:36–40; 17:62–65; 38:79–85):

قَالَ أَنظِرْنِىٓ إِلَىٰ يَوْمِ يُبْعَثُونَ

“He said: Reprieve me till the day when they are raised (from the dead).”

— Qur’an 7:14 · Sūrat al-Aʿrāf · Pickthall

Now Jubilees, written some seven centuries before the Qur’an. The evil spirits are being bound; their chief negotiates:

“And the chief of the spirits, Mastéma, came and said: ‘Lord, Creator, let some of them remain before me, and let them hearken to my voice, and do all that I shall say unto them; for if some of them are not left to me, I shall not be able to execute the power of my will on the sons of men; for these are for corruption and leading astray before my judgment, for great is the wickedness of the sons of men.’ And He said: ‘Let the tenth part of them remain before him, and let nine parts descend into the place of condemnation.’”

— Jubilees 10:8–9 · trans. R. H. Charles (1902) · public domain

Tesei’s analysis of the match:

“This episode has a close parallel in Jubilees, where the evil angel Mastema asks and obtains from God that some of the demonic entities at his service be spared to perform the task of tempting the sons of men (10:1–14)… What marks a unique parallel between the two episodes in Jubilees and the Qur’ān is the negotiation that the two evil entities undertake with God. In both cases, a wicked angel asks God something concerned with his ability to exercise a negative influence on humans. In both cases, God agrees — an agreement that appears as a real investiture of the devil as a tempter divinely appointed… These are narrative elements that, as far as I was able to find, do not occur in other traditions, about neither the fall of Satan nor the fallen angels. The only real difference between the episodes in Jubilees and in the Qur’ān is the moment of sacred history when the scene of the negotiation occurs — at the time around the Flood in Jubilees, at the beginning of human history in the Qur’ān.”

— Tesei, “Echoes of Pseudepigrapha in the Qur’ān,” 2020

A wicked angel bargains with God and receives a commission to tempt humanity. The motif appears in Jubilees, and in the Qur’an, and — as far as Tesei could find — nowhere else. That is not the kind of parallel coincidence produces.

The word the Ethiopians kept

Tesei also notes a striking linguistic link. The Qur’an says Iblīs “was of the jinn”:

وَإِذْ قُلْنَا لِلْمَلَـٰٓئِكَةِ ٱسْجُدُوا۟ لِـَٔادَمَ فَسَجَدُوٓا۟ إِلَّآ إِبْلِيسَ كَانَ مِنَ ٱلْجِنِّ فَفَسَقَ عَنْ أَمْرِ رَبِّهِۦٓ ۗ أَفَتَتَّخِذُونَهُۥ وَذُرِّيَّتَهُۥٓ أَوْلِيَآءَ مِن دُونِى وَهُمْ لَكُمْ عَدُوٌّۢ ۚ بِئْسَ لِلظَّـٰلِمِينَ بَدَلًا

“And (remember) when We said unto the angels: Fall prostrate before Adam, and they fell prostrate, all save Iblis. He was of the jinn, so he rebelled against his Lord’s command.”

— Qur’an 18:50 · Sūrat al-Kahf · Pickthall

“Worthy of attention is also the use of the term jinn (demon) that in quranic narratives is associated to the fallen angels myth. The Arabic jinn can be compared to the Geʿez gannənt, ‘demons’, that in 1 Enoch (19:1) and in Jubilees (7:27; 10:12) designates the spirit emanating from the fallen angels’ bastard offspring.”

— Tesei, “Echoes of Pseudepigrapha in the Qur’ān,” 2020

We know the Geʿez wording because Ethiopia preserved these books — the same tradition that gave the world its only complete copies of them. Keep that in mind for the transmission question at the end.

A puzzle named ʿUzayr

Qur’an 9:30 reports that “the Jews said, ʿUzayr is the son of Allah”:

وَقَالَتِ ٱلْيَهُودُ عُزَيْرٌ ٱبْنُ ٱللَّهِ وَقَالَتِ ٱلنَّصَـٰرَى ٱلْمَسِيحُ ٱبْنُ ٱللَّهِ ۖ ذَٰلِكَ قَوْلُهُم بِأَفْوَٰهِهِمْ ۖ يُضَـٰهِـُٔونَ قَوْلَ ٱلَّذِينَ كَفَرُوا۟ مِن قَبْلُ ۚ قَـٰتَلَهُمُ ٱللَّهُ ۚ أَنَّىٰ يُؤْفَكُونَ

“And the Jews say: Ezra is the son of Allah, and the Christians say: The Messiah is the son of Allah. That is their saying with their mouths. They imitate the saying of those who disbelieved of old. Allah (Himself) fighteth against them. How perverse are they!”

— Qur’an 9:30 · Sūrat at-Tawbah · Pickthall

No Jewish or Christian tradition describes Ezra — the usual identification — in such terms. Patricia Crone revived Paul Casanova’s proposal that ʿUzayr is a misreading of Azazel, the leader of the fallen Watchers (1 Enoch 8:1; 10:4–8), reflecting a Quranic polemic against Jewish worship of angels, connected to the Jewish magic bowls of Iraq in which Azazel is invoked.

Tesei’s assessment, stated with his own caution:

“However, it should be noticed that, as far as I know, no palaeographical evidence supports the misreading postulated by Casanova to connect the name ʿUzayr to the name of Azael.”

— Tesei, “Echoes of Pseudepigrapha in the Qur’ān,” 2020

So this one stays on the shelf marked intriguing but unproven — a hypothesis from two leading scholars in the field, not an established finding. What it does establish is that the leading researchers on the Qur’an’s environment keep finding themselves reaching for the Watchers tradition to explain its vocabulary.

The scrolls of Abraham and Moses, and a Syriac apocalypse

Qur’an 87:18–19 refers to “the former scrolls, the scrolls of Abraham and Moses”:

إِنَّ هَـٰذَا لَفِى ٱلصُّحُفِ ٱلْأُولَىٰ
صُحُفِ إِبْرَٰهِيمَ وَمُوسَىٰ

“Lo! This is in the former scrolls, / The Books of Abraham and Moses.”

— Qur’an 87:18–19 · Sūrat al-Aʿlā · Pickthall

The Pentateuch is never called the “scrolls of Moses” in the Qur’an — that is the Tawrāt — and attributing scrolls to Abraham alongside Moses points to another corpus. Tesei suggests the Qur’an is adopting ideas also expressed in Jubilees: Moses receiving at Sinai “a more complete revelation than the one transmitted in the written Torah,” and Abraham as “copyist and transmitter of ancient writings composed by his ancestors.”

His strongest original case, though, is structural. Qur’an 23:93–103 runs through a dialogue-and-judgment sequence that mirrors 4 Ezra 7 — a Jewish apocalyptic work that the Syriac Peshitta carries as canonical scripture, the Bible of the Syriac Christians. Consider just the middle of the passage:

حَتَّىٰٓ إِذَا جَآءَ أَحَدَهُمُ ٱلْمَوْتُ قَالَ رَبِّ ٱرْجِعُونِ
لَعَلِّىٓ أَعْمَلُ صَـٰلِحًا فِيمَا تَرَكْتُ ۚ كَلَّآ ۚ إِنَّهَا كَلِمَةٌ هُوَ قَآئِلُهَا ۖ وَمِن وَرَآئِهِم بَرْزَخٌ إِلَىٰ يَوْمِ يُبْعَثُونَ

“Until, when death cometh unto one of them, he saith: My Lord! Send me back, / That I may do right in that which I have left behind! But nay! It is but a word that he speaketh; and behind them is a barrier until the day when they are raised.”

— Qur’an 23:99–100 · Sūrat al-Muʾminūn · Pickthall

Tesei shows that the whole passage tracks 4 Ezra in sequence: the request to be shown the punishment of sinners with the warning not to be counted among the evil-doers (Q 23:93–98 ↔ 4 Ezra 7:75–77), the dead man who cannot return (Q 23:99–100 ↔ 4 Ezra 7:78–82), and Judgment Day with no kinship ties and a set of scales (Q 23:101–103 ↔ 4 Ezra 7:104–105 and 3:34). He stresses that the parallels “occur in the same narrative order in the two texts,” and concludes:

“While caution is still required, Q 23:93–103 might represent a rare case of a long quranic passage presenting textual correspondences with a pseudepigraphical work. If this was the case, it could be argued that, alongside being familiar with themes and motifs of the pseudepigraphical tradition, the quranic author/s might also have had knowledge of some of the actual texts.”

— Tesei, “Echoes of Pseudepigrapha in the Qur’ān,” 2020

Same material, same order, inside a passage that reads like a compressed retelling of the older text. When the sequence matches as well as the content, coincidence is the explanation that has to work hardest.

The ḥadīth carries the same traditions

The parallels do not stop at the Qur’an. The ḥadīth corpus preserves material paralleling the extra-biblical literature too:

Adam’s height, stated nowhere in Genesis, appears in Second Temple and Syriac Christian expansions:

“Allah created Adam, making him 60 cubits tall… Any person who will enter Paradise will resemble Adam (in appearance and figure). People have been decreasing in stature since Adam’s creation.”

— Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī 3326 · USC-MSA Vol. 4, Bk 55, No. 543

A personified sun performing acts before God’s Throne — stock imagery of the Enochic cosmology in 1 Enoch 72, where the sun traverses gates and is guided by angels:

“It goes (i.e. travels) till it prostrates Itself underneath the Throne and takes the permission to rise again, and it is permitted.”

— Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī 3199 · USC-MSA Vol. 4, Bk 54, No. 421

And the Night Journey itself — a guided tour of graded heavens with gatekeepers, glimpses of patriarchs, and a final approach toward the divine presence — is the core genre of 1 Enoch 14, 2 Enoch, and the Ascension of Isaiah. The specific ḥadīth (Bukhārī 349, quoted in the Idrīs section above) distributes the prophets across those heavens in the manner of that literature.

One caveat worth keeping in view: for the Miʿrāj, the precise literary genealogy is debated. It is fair to describe it as a shared motif-set with the ascent-apocalypse genre rather than a quotation of any particular text.

So how did it get there?

The honest answer is that scholarship has not settled the route. Tesei states it flatly:

“Retracing a history of transmission of pseudepigrapha to the Qur’ān’s environment appears a highly problematic task that brings into play more general questions still awaiting an answer… At the present stage of the investigation, determining how traditions from the pseudepigraphical corpus reached the original Qur’ān’s cradle is an unsolvable question.”

— Tesei, “Echoes of Pseudepigrapha in the Qur’ān,” 2020

The candidate vectors scholarship has identified:

1. Oral storytelling. Late antique Arabia sat at the crossroads of Jewish and Christian midrashic storytelling; the Qur’an’s allusive style presupposes an audience that already knows the stories.
2. Syriac Christianity. The Syriac Bible — which carries 4 Ezra — and Syriac homiletics dominated the Christian literary culture of the northern Arabian milieu, and Tesei documents the Qur’an blending scriptural corpora the way Syriac homilists did.
3. Iraqi Jewish magic. Crone located the entry-points of the names Hārūt/Mārūt and ʿUzayr/Azazel in the milieu of Sasanian-Iraqi Jewish magic bowls.
4. Ethiopia/Aksum. The Geʿez tradition preserved 1 Enoch and Jubilees as canon, and the jinn ↔ Geʿez gannənt lexical link is a genuine point of contact. But no manuscript evidence places Geʿez Enochic texts in the Ḥijāz.

What the lexical data cannot do is adjudicate between these channels. The defensible conclusion is the broad one: the Qur’an’s Enochic and Jubilees material entered through the late antique Judeo-Christian oral and literary environment of the Near East, with Ethiopia, Syria, and Iraq all possible contributors.

One historical note while we are here: the popular story that Muhammad himself travelled to Aksum and encountered these books there does not hold. The first-hijra tradition — itself of debated historicity (see “Weeping Christians and the First Hijra to Ethiopia,” Islam and Christian–Muslim Relations, 2026) — describes his followers migrating to Aksum, not Muhammad.

What the evidence does — and does not — show

Read the strongest cases side by side and the pattern is hard to miss. A story about angels teaching forbidden arts in Babylon, told nowhere in the Bible and told in full in 1 Enoch. A prophet carried bodily to a lofty place in 1 Enoch and Jubilees, “raised to a high position” in the Qur’an. A devil negotiating a commission to tempt mankind in Jubilees 10 and in the Qur’an’s Iblīs narratives — a narrative device Tesei could not find in any other tradition. A judgment scene whose dialogue, sequence, and imagery track 4 Ezra 7 in the same order.

The Qur’an’s biblical stories are not simply the Bible retold. Their narrative texture is that of post-biblical Jewish interpretive literature — including stories (the Watchers, Mastema’s negotiation, Enoch’s assumption) that appear nowhere in the canonical Old Testament. A text that presents itself as Scripture while absorbing non-canonical Second Temple haggadah invites the question of which human sources stand behind it.

Early Muslim exegesis knew this. Al-Ṭabarī and al-Qurṭubī filled in the Qur’an’s vague allusions — Hārūt and Mārūt, Idrīs as Enoch — precisely from the extra-biblical books. The tradition that material was later stigmatised (isrā’īliyyāt became a pejorative), but the chain of custody is visible: Second Temple pseudepigrapha, late antique oral tradition, the Qur’an, and then early tafsīr reaching back into the same pseudepigrapha to explain the Qur’an.

The same evidence, read honestly, has limits you should know:

• No verse of the Qur’an quotes 1 Enoch or Jubilees verbatim. Tesei: “The Qur’ān almost never quotes from the biblical corpus.”
• The Ethiopic transmission route is unproven; Syriac and Iraqi-Jewish vectors are equally or better supported.
• The strongest cases show reworked motifs, not copied texts — the Qur’an consistently exonerates the angels, relocates scenes, and renames figures.

Those limits do not weaken the case; they define it. What the documents show is not plagiarism but participation — the Qur’an speaking the same narrative language as the pseudepigrapha, including its most distinctive inventions. A book that claims to confirm and correct the previous Scriptures is, in these passages, carrying cargo the previous Scriptures never loaded.

Sources

Qur’an: Uthmani Arabic with M. M. Pickthall’s translation (quran.com, translation 19)

• Qur’an 2:102 (Sūrat al-Baqarah)
• Qur’an 7:14 (Sūrat al-Aʿrāf)
• Qur’an 9:30 (Sūrat at-Tawbah)
• Qur’an 18:50 (Sūrat al-Kahf)
• Qur’an 19:56–57 (Sūrat Maryam)
• Qur’an 23:99–100 (Sūrat al-Muʾminūn)
• Qur’an 87:18–19 (Sūrat al-Aʿlā)
• Also cited in prose without Arabic: Qur’an 7:14–18; 15:16–18; 15:36–40; 17:62–65; 37:6–10; 38:79–85; 53:36–37; 72:8–9

Ḥadīth (sunnah.com; text verified via quranx.com, USC-MSA numbering)

• Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī 349 · USC-MSA Vol. 1, Bk 8, No. 345 — the night journey, prophets in the heavens
• Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī 3199 · USC-MSA Vol. 4, Bk 54, No. 421 — the sun’s prostration
• Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī 3326 · USC-MSA Vol. 4, Bk 55, No. 543 — Adam’s height

Extra-biblical sources (public-domain translations)

• 1 Enoch, trans. R. H. Charles (Oxford: Clarendon, 1912) — 6:2–7; 7:1–2; 8:1, 8:3; 12:3–4; 19:1; 72; 87:3
• Book of Jubilees, trans. R. H. Charles (London: Black, 1902) — 4:17–23; 7:27; 10:1–14
• Testament of Solomon 20:12 (in The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament, ed. R. H. Charles, 1913)
• 4 Ezra 3:34; 7:75–105 (canonical in the Syriac Peshitta), as quoted in Tesei 2020

Scholarship

• Patricia Crone, “The Book of Watchers in the Qur’ān”, in The Qur’ānic Pagans and Related Matters, ed. Hanna Siurua (Leiden: Brill, 2016), vol. 1, pp. 183–218
• Patricia Crone, “Idrīs, Atraḫasīs and al-Khiḍr,” in The Qur’ānic Pagans and Related Matters (Brill, 2016), vol. 3, pp. 44–81
• Tommaso Tesei, “Echoes of Pseudepigrapha in the Qur’ān”, in C. A. Segovia, Remapping Emergent Islam (Amsterdam University Press, 2020), ch. 8, DOI 10.5117/9789462988064_08
• Tommaso Tesei, “The Fall of Iblīs and its Enochic Background,” in Stories and Traditions in Transformation (Leiden: Brill, 2016), pp. 66–81
• John C. Reeves, “Some Parascriptural Dimensions of the ‘Tale of Hārūt wa-Mārūt’”, Journal of the American Oriental Society
• Gabriel Said Reynolds, The Qur’ān and Its Biblical Subtext (London: Routledge, 2010)
• Nicolai Sinai, The Qur’ān: A Historical-Critical Introduction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017)
• Annette Yoshiko Reed and John C. Reeves, Enoch from Antiquity to the Middle Ages, vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018)
• “Weeping Christians and the First Hijra to Ethiopia,” Islam and Christian–Muslim Relations (2026) — on the weak historicity of the first-hijra narrative

Notes

• 1 Enoch and Jubilees quotations are trimmed with ellipses (…); all wording is Charles’s translation, unchanged. The Book of Enoch text is the Project Gutenberg edition (#77935) and Jubilees the Internet Archive scan of Charles’s 1902 edition (cu31924060029984); both public domain.
• Ḥadīth wording follows the USC-MSA translations at quranx.com (sunnah.com was unavailable to automated access at time of writing); sunnah.com reference numbers are given as the canonical citation. Bukhārī 349 (Arabic numbering) corresponds to USC-MSA Vol. 1, Book 8, Hadith 345; 3199 to Vol. 4, Book 54, Hadith 421; 3326 to Vol. 4, Book 55, Hadith 543.
• The ʿUzayr/Azazel identification (Qur’an 9:30) is reported here as the scholarly hypothesis it is; Tesei explicitly notes the absence of palaeographic support for the proposed misreading.
• The Isrāʾ/Miʿrāj (Bukhārī 349) is treated as a shared motif-set with the ascent-apocalypse genre rather than a quotation of any particular text; its precise literary genealogy is debated.
• Tesei 2020 is an English-language chapter; quotations from it are verbatim from the version linked above. The Qur’anic passages discussed but not quoted in Arabic (e.g. 23:93–103, 2:101, 15:16–18) can be checked against the linked quran.com pages.

Qur’an quotations: Uthmani Arabic with Marmaduke Pickthall’s translation (public domain), via quran.com, pulled from the quran.com API and verified before publication. Ḥadīth quotations: USC-MSA translation via quranx.com, cross-checked against the sunnah.com reference numbers. 1 Enoch and Jubilees quotations: R. H. Charles translations (public domain), verified against the linked editions. Scholarly quotations: from the linked published articles, quoted verbatim.