Uzair

Uzair (, ') is a figure who is mentioned in the Quran, Surah at-Tawbah, verse , which states that he was "revered by the Jews as the son of God". Uzair is most often identified with the biblical Ezra. Historians have described the reference as enigmatic since such views have not been found in Jewish sources. Islamic scholars have interpreted the Quranic reference in different ways, with some claiming that it alluded to a "specific group of Jews".

According to Ibn Kathir, Uzair lived between the times of Sulaiman and the time of Zakariya, father of John the Baptist Some Quranic commentators viewed Uzayr as a learned scholar who sought to teach the people the forgotten laws of God. He is sometimes identified as the protagonist in the Parable of the Hamlet in Ruins in surah Baqara (2:259).

Some Islamic scholars held Uzayr to be one of the prophets. Although there is a hadith that reports that God expunged Uzayr from the list of prophets because he refused to believe in predestination, but this hadith is considered da'if (weak) and is rejected by most Islamic scholars.

Ibn Hazm, al-Samawal al-Maghribi and other scholars put forth the view that Uzair or one of his disciples falsified the Torah and this claim became a common theme in Islamic polemics against the Bible. Many aspects of later Islamic narratives show similarity to Vision of Ezra, an apocryphal text which seems to have been partially known to Muslim readers.

Classical Muslim scholars who were aware of Jewish and Christian denials of belief in Ezra explained that it was only one Jew or a small group of Jews who worshipped Uzayr, or that the verse refers to the extreme admiration of Jews for their rabbis.

Many classical Muslim scholars suggest that the description of Ezra as the son of God does not mean the same as it does for Christians in Jesus Christ, but rather it means the same as the son of God in Judaism, and that the Qur’anic verse rejects the use of the term “''son of God.''” In Islam, the use of the term “''son of God''” is completely forbidden, considering it a lie against God, as mentioned in the verse.

Authors of the 1906 '' Jewish Encyclopedia'' viewed the Quranic reference as a "malevolent metaphor" for the reverence accorded to Ezra in Judaism. Some modern historians have favored the theory that a Jewish sect in Arabia venerated Ezra to the extent of deifying him. Gordon Darnell Newby has suggested that the Quranic expression may have reflected Ezra's possible designation as one of the Sons of God by Jews of the Hijaz.G. D. Newby, A History Of The Jews Of Arabia, 1988, University Of South Carolina Press, p. 59 (quoted i
Was `Uzayr (Ezra) Called The Son Of God?
by M S M Saifullah & Mustafa Ahmed

Other scholars proposed emendations of the received spelling of the name, leading to readings ‘Uzayl (Azazel), ‘Azīz, or ‘Azariah ( Abednego).

Quranic and hadith context

The Quran states that Jews exalted Ezra as a son of God:

The Jews say, “Ezra is the son of God,” while the Christians say, “Christ is the son of God.” Such are their baseless assertions, only parroting the words of earlier disbelievers. May God condemn them! How can they be deluded ˹from the truth˺?

In February 624, when the ''qibla'' (direction of prayer) changed from Jerusalem to Mecca. Sallam ibn Mishkam, a Jew who lived in Medina and his friends asked Muhammad: “How can we follow you when you have abandoned our ''qibla'' and you do not allege that Uzair ( Ezra) is the son of God?” This verse is situated in a context of theological disputes with the Jewish community of Medina. The Quran emphasizes the absolute divinity of God and warns against associating any being with him ('' shirk''). It further condemns Jewish and Christian leaders of the time for deceiving the masses into taking "their priests and their anchorites to be their lords in derogation of God". In casting doubt on claims about the divine status of Uzayr and Christ, the Quran also instructs Muslims to reject such beliefs. These arguments reflect the tensions between the Muslim, Christian and Jewish communities of Arabia.

Islamic tradition and literature

In some Islamic texts, Ezra is identified as the person mentioned in Qur'an 2:259:

Or ˹are you not aware of˺ the one who passed by a city which was in ruins. He wondered, “How could God bring this back to life after its destruction?” So God caused him to die for a hundred years then brought him back to life. God asked, “How long have you remained ˹in this state˺?” He replied, “Perhaps a day or part of a day.” God said, “No! You have remained here for a hundred years! Just look at your food and drink—they have not spoiled. ˹But now˺ look at ˹the remains of˺ your donkey! And ˹so˺ We have made you into a sign for humanity. And look at the bones ˹of the donkey˺, how We bring them together then clothe them with flesh!” When this was made clear to him, he declared, “˹Now˺ I know that God is Most Capable of everything.”

The history text ''Zubdat-al Tawarikh'', dedicated to Ottoman sultan Murad III in 1583, narrates a story of Uzair's grief for the destruction of Jerusalem. His grief is said to have been so great that God took his soul and brought him back to life after Jerusalem was reconstructed. In the miniature accompanying the manuscript, the building on the lower right depicts the rebuilt city of Jerusalem in the form a typical sixteenth-century Ottoman building with a dome and an arched portico. The former ruins of Jerusalem are alluded to by the broken arches and columns on the left.

According to the classical Quranic exegete Ibn Kathir, after Ezra questioned how the resurrection will take place on the Day of Judgment, God had him brought back to life many years after he died. He rode on his revived donkey and entered his native place. But the people did not recognize him, nor did his household, except the maid, who was now an old blind woman. He prayed to God to cure her blindness and she could see again. He meets his son who recognized him by a mole between his shoulders and was older than he was. Ezra then led the people to locate the only surviving copy of Torah as the remaining were burnt by Nebuchadnezzar. It was rotting and crumpled, so Ezra had a new copy of the Torah made which he had previously memorized. He thus renovated the Torah to the Israelites. Ibn Kathir mentions that the ''sign'' in the phrase "And that We may make of thee a ''sign'' unto the people" was that he was younger than his children. After this miracle, Ibn Kathir writes that Jews began to claim that Ezra was the 'son of God'.

The modern Quranic exegesis of Abul A'la Maududi states:

According to the Ahmadiyya Muhammad Ali's Quranic commentary, there indeed existed a group of Jews who venerated Ezra as the son of God. According to Ali, Al-Qastallani held that in the ''Kitan al-Nikah'' there was a party of Jews who held this belief.

Alleged falsification of scripture

Ibn Hazm, an Andalusian Muslim scholar, explicitly accused Ezra of being a liar and a heretic who falsified and added interpolations into the Biblical text. Ibn Hazm provided a polemical list of what he considered "chronological and geographical inaccuracies and contradictions; theological impossibilities (anthropomorphic expressions, stories of fornication and whoredom, and the attributing of sins to prophets), as well as lack of reliable transmission ( tawatur) of the text", Hava Lazarus-Yafeh states. Encyclopedia of Islam, ''Uzair''Hava Lazarus-Yafeh, ''Tahrif'', Encyclopedia of Islam In response to attacks on the personality of Ezra, the Byzantine emperor Leo III defended Ezra as a pious, reliable person. The Jewish convert to Islam al-Samaw'al (d. 1175) accused Ezra of interpolating stories such as Lot's daughters to sully David's origins and to prevent the rule of the Davidic line during the Second Temple period.
The writings of ibn Hazm and al-Samaw'al were adopted and updated only slightly by later Muslim authors up to contemporary times.

Jewish tradition and literature

As in Islam, a fundamental tenet of Judaism is that God is not bound by any limitations of time, matter, or space, and that the idea of any person being God, a part of God, or a mediator to God, is heresy. The Book of Ezra, which Judaism accepts as a chronicle of the life of Ezra and which predates Muhammad and the Qur'an by around 1000 years, gives Ezra's human lineage as being the son of Seraiah and a direct descendant of Aaron. Tractate Ta'anit of the Jerusalem Talmud, which predates Muhammad by two to three hundred years, states that “if a man claims to be God, he is a liar.” Exodus Rabba 29 says, "'I am the first and I am the last, and beside Me there is no God' I am the first, I have no father; I am the last, I have no brother. Beside Me there is no God; I have no son." However the term 'sons of gods' occurs in Genesis. The Encyclopedia of Judaism clarifies that the title of 'son of God' is attributed a person whose piety has placed him in a very near relationship to God and "by no means carries the idea of physical descent from, and essential unity with, God".

Reuven Firestone says: It is possible that there were some Hashemite groups that went beyond the accepted faith with an important figure such as Ezra. Two ancient books that originally linked the divine or angelic center with Ezra and Enoch from the Tanakh figures.

The title of son of God (servant of God) is used by the Jews for any pious person as is evident according to Encyclopedia of Judaism which states that the title of son of God is attributed by the Jews "to any one whose piety has placed him in a filial relation to God (see Wisdom ii. 13, 16, 18; v. 5, where "the sons of God" are identical with "the saints"; comp. Ecclus. irachiv. 10). It is through such personal relations that the individual becomes conscious of God's fatherhood."

The International Bible Encyclopedia Online notes that the Targum identifies the angel in Malachi 3:1 as Ezra and notes that because of this interpretation some believed that Ezra is actually an angel and not a human.

Many Jews have recorded a legend that light emanates from Ezra's tomb in Iraq. According to historians, the tomb was considered a holy place for some Jews, as they would make pilgrimages to it.

Moshe Idel, an Israeli historian and philosopher who specializes in Jewish mysticism, is an emeritus professor of Jewish thought at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Indeed in the Qur’an 9:30, some Jews were described critically as believing in a form of sonship relating to the mysterious figure of Uzair, who was designated as the Son of God, and Muslim authors even reported that some Jews worshipped him as such. This means that long before the emergence of the Ashkenazi esoteric literatures to be discussed below in chapter 2, concerning a hypostatic versus a national understanding of sonship, some Jews entertained concepts of or even practiced worship related to figure described as a Son of God. Do these two references to sonship reflect a broader historical situation? At least in principle, we should be aware of the possible role played by the vast poetic literature written in the land of Israel in the early Middle Ages, and its impact on southern Italian poems since the ninth century, and also of the role played by Ashkenazi religious poetry in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, in transmission of mythologoumena from East to West. Since those literatures are quite abstruse, and many of them have not yet been analysed from the conceptual point of view, they may constitute another potential bridge between continents and historical periods.

Historical analysis

In ''A History of the Jews of Arabia: From Ancient Times to Their Eclipse under Islam'', scholar Gordon Darnell Newby notes the following on the topic of Uzair, the angel Metatron and the Bene Elohim (lit. "Sons of God"):

...we can deduce that the inhabitants of Hijaz during Muhammad's time knew portions, at least, of 3 Enoch in association with the Jews. The angels over which Metatron becomes chief are identified in the Enoch traditions as the sons of God, the Bene Elohim, the Watchers, the fallen ones as the causer of the flood. In 1 Enoch, and 4 Ezra, the term Son of God can be applied to the Messiah, but most often it is applied to the righteous men, of whom Jewish tradition holds there to be no more righteous than the ones God elected to translate to heaven alive. It is easy, then, to imagine that among the Jews of the Hijaz who were apparently involved in mystical speculations associated with the merkabah, Ezra, because of the traditions of his translation, because of his piety, and particularly because he was equated with Enoch as the Scribe of God, could be termed one of the Bene Elohim. And, of course, he would fit the description of religious leader (one of the ''ahbar'' of the Qur'an 9:31) whom the Jews had exalted.

In the Second Syriac Esdras, Ezra is called the scribe of the knowledge of the Most High.

Also in ''The Concise Encyclopaedia Of Islam.''

there seem to have been some Jews in pre-Islamic Arabia that equated Ezra with Enoch and said that Enoch was assumed into  Heaven stripped of his humanity and transformed into Metatron

Mark Lidzbarski and Michael Lodahl have also hypothesized existence of an Arabian Jewish sect whose veneration of Ezra bordered on deification.

The 1906 '' Jewish Encyclopedia'' states:

"In the Koran (ix. 30) the Jews are charged with worshiping Ezra ("'Uzair") as the son of God—a malevolent metaphor for the great respect which was paid by the Jews to the memory of Ezra as the restorer of the Law, and from which the Ezra legends of apocryphal literature (II Esd. xxxiv. 37-49) originated (as to how they developed in Mohammedan legends see Damiri, "Ḥayat al-Ḥayawan," i. 304-305). It is hard to bring into harmony with this the fact, related by Jacob Saphir ("Eben Sappir," i. 99), that the Jews of South Arabia have a pronounced aversion for the memory of Ezra, and even exclude his name from their category of proper names."

Rabbi Allen Maller states that there is a hadith in Jami` at-Tirmidhi which states that Jews worship their rabbis, because they accept what their rabbis say over the Word of God. He affirms this to be true because Orthodox Jews practice Judaism based on the rabbi's interpretation of the oral Torah. He also cites that ibn Abbas narrated that four Jews believed that Uzayr was the son of God.

The Egyptian translator and critic Ibrahim Awad says:

The '' Shorter Jewish Encyclopedia'' says that the saying of Uzair son of God, may be an oral tradition of the Jews of Yemen and linked to the Book of Second Esdras. Hirschberg suggested that some Yemenite Jews called Ezra the son of God because they believed that Ezra was the Messiah.

Alternative readings of the name

Some scholars proposed emendations of the received spelling of the name, عزير. Paul Casanova and Steven M. Wasserstrom read the name as ‘Uzayl (عزيل), a variant of Asael (Enoch 6:8) or ‘Azazel (Leviticus 16:8), who is identified as the leader of the fallen angels called "sons of God" in Genesis 6:2. J. Finkel instead reads the name as ‘Azīz (عزيز, potentate), connecting it to the phrase "thou art my son" in Psalms 2:7.

Viviane Comerro considers the possibility of Quranic Uzair not being Ezra but Azariah instead, relying on Ibn Qutaybah, and identifying a confusion committed by Muslim exegetes. She declares : "There is, from Muslim traditionalists, a confusion between two distinct characters, Ezra Azràet Azariah Azarya(h)...) Thus, it is possible that the quranic vocable Uzayr could find its origin in Azariah's one."

People or things was Apotheosiso by Jews

* Metatron
* Menachem Mendel Schneerson
* Golden calf

References

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Ezra
Hebrew Bible people in Islam
At-Tawba
Quran-related controversies