Introduction to the Study of The Holy Quran — Page 34
34 and lie with him, that we may preserve seed of our father. And they made their father drink wine that night also: and the younger arose, and lay with him; and he perceived not when she lay down nor when she arose. Thus were both the daughters of Lot with child by their father. No comment is necessary on this terrible narrative. It offends our sense both of the factual and the moral. But the present Torah does not hesitate to attribute this to a Prophet. From this we have to conclude that the Torah, as we know it today, is not the Torah revealed to Moses. It must have been composed later by Jewish scholars at a time when they had developed hatred for the sons, real or supposed, of Lot, Moab and Ammon. The faith of these Jewish scholars had become so weak, their hearts had become so hardened that to defame Moab and Ammon they did not hesitate to attribute to the Prophet Lot conduct which is reprehensible in the extreme and the attribution of which to any Prophet is entirely intolerable. Is the Christian and the Jewish world today prepared to hear such things attributed to the Prophets of God? If they are, it is only further evidence that we should have had a book which corrected the depraved mentality of our day. (3) In Deuteronomy 25:5-6 we read: If brethren dwell together, and one of them die, and have no child, the wife of the dead shall not marry without unto a stranger: her husband’s brother shall go in unto her, and take her to him to wife, and perform the duty of an husband’s brother unto her. And it shall be, that the firstborn which she beareth shall succeed in the name of his brother which is dead, and his name be not put out of Israel. This teaching is ridiculous and depraved in the extreme. It allows a widow to submit to her husband’s brother and bear children who should succeed in the name of the deceased. Can children produced by one person perpetuate the name of another? If children born to one’s brother can perpetuate one’s name, what need is there for the brother to have marital relations with one’s widow? If a brother’s son can be treated as one’s own son, there is no need to allow the brother to have immoral relations with one’s wife. Far better would it have been for the Bible to declare that of the sons of the brother one may be attributed to the dead brother. This would have been reasonable enough. But it seems that as Jewish scholars invented a foul accusation against Lot, so God made them enter into the Torah an injunction the effects of which should recoil upon the Jewish scholars who had tried to defame Prophet Lot. God’s vengeance was dire but well deserved. Jewish women were led by injunctions invented by Jewish scholars to do what Jewish doctors had attributed to Lot. These defects of the Old Testament clearly point to the need of a perfect book which should be free from these defects, and that book is the Quran.