ABSTRACT
This chapter situates the emergence of the Qur'ān (and later Islam) within its late antique political and religious contexts, dominated by the contemporary Melkite, Jacobite, and Nestorian sects of Christianity, by rabbinic Jewish traditions, and by Arabian polytheistic traditions. It contextualizes the al-Khiḍr narrative (Q. 18:60–82), a pericope known as ‘Moses and the Servant’, which is a wisdom literature story about the nature of God's mysterious justice. It investigates as well the earliest exegetical (tafsīr) identification/naming of the “servant” in the narrative as “al-Khiḍr,” and suggests that the tafsīr reference to “al-Khiḍr” functioned as an anonymized epithet for late-antique Elijah.
