ABSTRACT
Qurʾānic studies started with a surgical operation upon the text, which was looked upon as a collection of historical and doctrinal statements rather than a comprehensive message. European philology has developed out of biblical exegesis. The particular textual politics involved in bringing about Middle Meccan shift in the hermeneutical paradigm are typologies, that, although current in Judaism as well, in Late Antiquity enjoyed a particularly high status in the Christian reading of the Bible. As the scriptural text was anyhow conveyed in Arabic for the first time, its segmentation into pericopes could appear as a legitimate process supported by the fact that the presentation of scripture in the form of pericopes was common in the Jewish and Christian communities. The Hebrew text of the Pentateuch, which was read in liturgy in the Hellenistic era, needed to be flanked by an Aramaic translation, the so-called Targum, which often entailed interpretative extensions.
