Was Muhammad prophesied in the Bible?

The scene is Horeb. Israel, terrified by the fire and the voice, asks for a mediator, and God answers with a promise that outlasts the moment:

The same passage hands the reader its own test for sorting true prophets from false:

Read inside Deuteronomy, the promise concerns Israel's own life. The chapter around it regulates priests, Levites, and prophets against Canaanite divination, and “from among you, of your brothers” (Deut 18:15) most naturally means a fellow Israelite. Rashi, in the mainstream of Jewish interpretation, reads the verse as a succession: a prophet God raises up in Moses's stead, “from prophet to prophet” ↗, each to be heeded, each measured by the passage's own test; Ibn Ezra reads “like me” against the diviners the chapter bans: where the nations listen to enchanters, Israel is promised a prophet of God. The Torah's last chapter sounds the same note:

On its face that is a closing editorial note about Israel's own history, and the succession reading is the majority view among critical scholars.

The Christian reading is early and canonical. In the temple itself, Peter quotes this chapter to a Jewish audience and names its prophet:

The application runs in servant and prophet categories: the same speech calls Jesus “his Servant Jesus” (Acts 3:13) and “his servant” (Acts 3:26). The promise's singular shape, “a prophet… him,” tells the Christian reader that one figure was awaited. So does the expectation shown when priests ask John the Baptist “Are you the prophet?” (John 1:21). Peter, on this reading, named him.

The Muslim reading begins one word earlier: “of your brothers” does not always mean fellow Israelites in Deuteronomy. Israel is told that “your brothers, the children of Esau” (Deut 2:4) dwell in Seir, a brother nation outside Israel, so a brother nation, Ishmael's line, is a real option in the wording. The phrase “like me” fits a prophet who, like Moses, gave a law and founded a community. And “I will put my words in his mouth” (Deut 18:18) fits revelation recited word for word. ʿAlī al-Ṭabarī argued this reading in the ninth century (The Book of Religion and Empire ↗, translated by A. Mingana, 1922), an early systematic Muslim collection of Bible passages read as pointing to Muhammad; Ahmed Deedat's pamphlet What the Bible Says About Muhummed popularized the comparison, and Jamal Badawi presents the same reading in his Muhammad in the Bible lectures. Muslim presenters also turn Deuteronomy 34:10 back on the succession reading: if no prophet has arisen in Israel like Moses, they argue, the prophet like Moses comes from outside Israel.

This reading carries its own difficulty. Verse 15 says “from among you” (Hebrew miqqirbəḵā), words present in verse 15 even though absent from the parallel promise in verse 18. The brother-nation reading accounts for “of your brothers.” It strains on “from among you,” which most naturally places the prophet inside Israel.

The succession-of-prophets reading within Israel is the majority view among critical scholars and the mainstream Jewish reading. The reference to Jesus is the Christian reading, affirmed in Acts 3. The reference to Muhammad is a longstanding Muslim identification; what Quran 7:157 itself affirms is that a description is there, and the verse does not say where. What Deuteronomy 18 offers every claimant is a description, not a name. The promise and its test sit in Israel's own law; the reference is what each tradition claims.

On the night before the crucifixion, John's Gospel gives Jesus a long farewell, and inside it a promise that someone else is coming. Four passages carry the promise:

The Christian reading starts from the text's own identification. John 14:26 names the promised one “the Counselor, the Holy Spirit,” and the farewell describes an indwelling presence: the world “doesn't see him and doesn't know him,” but the disciples know him, “for he lives with you and will be in you” (John 14:17). Jesus ties the coming to his departure in the near term: “if I go, I will send him to you” (John 16:7). Acts 2 narrates the fulfillment at Pentecost. A human prophet six centuries on is visible and external, and sits awkwardly beside “that he may be with you forever” (John 14:16). This became the mainstream ancient Christian reading.

The Muslim reading grants the Greek and argues from the description. The promised one “will not speak from himself; but whatever he hears, he will speak” (John 16:13), and the Quran describes revelation through Muhammad in the same shape: “Nor does he speak from [his own] inclination. It is not but a revelation revealed” (Quran 53:3-4). He “will testify about me” (John 15:26) and “will glorify me” (John 16:14), and he will convict “the world about sin” (John 16:8): a public, speaking, testifying figure looks, to Muslim readers, more like a prophet than an indwelling presence. The identification is old. Ibn Isḥāq's Sira, the earliest surviving biography of Muhammad (its author died in 767), quotes John 15:23-16:1 from a Palestinian Syriac-type gospel text and glosses its word for the Counselor, munaḥḥemana: “in Syriac is Muhammad; in Greek he is the paraclete” (Guillaume translation, p. 104 ↗). The earliest surviving Muslim identification quotes the description and adds an identification resting on the meaning of the Syriac word; it proposes no different Greek reading.

The conjecture deserves its exact size. David Benjamin Keldani proposed in Muhammad in the Bible (1928) that John's text originally read periklytos, whose sense of a renowned one runs close to Aḥmad and Muhammad; Ahmed Deedat carried the suggestion to a mass audience after him. No known witness to John, in any language, supports periklytos; the Greek witnesses to these verses read paraklētos. The conjecture is unattested, and the Muslim case at its strongest never needed it: the serious argument is a claim about reference, about which figure fits the description Jesus gave.

That the Paraclete is the Holy Spirit is confessionally affirmed among Christians and, as a reading of John's text taken whole, the majority view among scholars of John. That the Paraclete foretold Muhammad is a longstanding Muslim identification, as old as the earliest surviving biography; the Quran's own affirmation (7:157) is that a description is there. The periklytos conjecture is unattested. John 14:26 stands in the text, and any Muslim reading of the farewell has to carry it; the contested question, here as in Deuteronomy 18, is who fits the description.

The shortest claim of the four. The beloved in the Song praises the man she loves:

Behind “altogether lovely” stand the Hebrew consonants m-ḥ-m-d: kullō maḥămaddîm. A woman is describing the man she loves in a love poem, and the claim is that the poem also carries the name Muhammad.

The grammar is not seriously contested. Maḥămaddîm is the plural of the common noun maḥmād, a desirable or precious thing, commonly taken as the plural Hebrew uses for emphasis: he is altogether desirable. The same noun appears doing ordinary work, in “Whatever is pleasant in your eyes” (1 Kings 20:6), in Lamentations 1:10, and at Hosea 9:6. Standard Hebrew lexicons carry the entry (BDB, s.v. maḥmād ↗). That much is known at the level of the lexicon.

Zakir Naik has argued in widely circulated lectures that the consonants spell Muhammad, with -îm read as a plural of respect, and the claim appears earlier in Abdul Haq Vidyarthi's Muhammad in World Scriptures (1940). The Muslim argument goes beyond the dictionary, because the Song is poetry, a poem that calls itself the Song of Songs, and deliberate double meaning is documented in it: when Cyrus Gordon, a scholar of Semitic languages, needed a name for the device in which one word faces two directions at once, he coined it, Janus parallelism, from this very book, where in Song 2:12 zāmîr can mean both pruning and singing and the poem means both. One proposed reading of the Song's own cast plays on a proper name. The woman is called the Shulammite, a title some scholars read as a play on Shelomoh, the Hebrew name of Solomon. Others derive it from the town of Shunem or from the root sh-l-m. A word carrying two senses at once is not foreign to this book.

Two facts of the language family carry the rest of the Muslim case. Hebrew and Arabic are sister languages, and ḥ-m-d is one Semitic root shared between them: Hebrew took it toward what is desired and precious, Arabic toward what is praised, and Muhammad, the praised one, is built on it. And Hebrew does use -îm in a way that is not about number: the grammars call it the plural of majesty, the ending that gives Elohim for the one God and adonim for a single master, plural forms that take singular verbs (Gesenius §124 ↗). Muslim interpreters argue that maḥămaddîm belongs in that family. The grammar books themselves file the word under the plural Hebrew uses for emphasis, he is altogether desirable, and the verse has no verb whose form could settle the question. The grammar shows emphasis, and by itself it shows nothing more.

One more fact comes from counting every place the word appears. Everywhere else the plural of maḥmād appears in the Hebrew Bible, it is tied to an owner or to the word after it: her precious things, our precious things, the desirable of the eye. Song of Solomon 5:16 is the only verse where the plural stands alone, and it describes a beloved man. The layers of the text then divide the evidence. The written vowel marks came from the Masoretes, scribes working between roughly the seventh and tenth centuries CE, though the marks record a way of reading older than the marks themselves; how the Hebrew text reached that standard form is a study of its own: how was the Old Testament put together? And translators working before Islam already treat the expression as ordinary description: the Old Greek has holos epithymia, altogether an object of desire, and the Vulgate, the church's Latin translation, has totus desiderabilis, wholly desirable. Muslim interpreters answer that a translation flattens exactly what a double meaning is, that a double meaning like this need not survive translation, and that their claim concerns the older consonantal text rather than the later vowel marks.

So the Muslim reading asks the reader to weigh three facts together, and then to weigh the odds. The Song is a poem with documented double meaning; Hebrew and Arabic are sister languages sharing the root ḥ-m-d; and the one place in scripture where this plural stands alone, it stands in a love song, describing a beloved man, on the consonants m-ḥ-m-d. Jewish and Christian readers answer that the plain sense is complete without a name, that the pre-Islamic translations read it that way, and that nothing else in the verse cues a name. Muslim interpreters answer with a question about odds: grant each fact on its own, then explain all three landing together, in the very book that gave this double-facing device its name, as an accident. Muslim interpreters and Jewish and Christian readers still dispute the identification.

The servant song opens with a figure who brings justice to the nations, and does it quietly:

Jewish readers start one chapter earlier, where the servant is named:

Isaiah 44:1-2 and 49:3 name Israel the same way. Within that reading, the rejoicing of Kedar and Sela in 42:11 belongs to the chorus that sweeps sea, islands, and wilderness in 42:10-12: the nations at the ends of the earth summoned to sing, in an address that does not identify the servant's homeland.

The Christian reading comes from the Gospel itself. Matthew watches Jesus heal the crowds, withdraw, and order silence, and says the scene fulfilled the song:

The baptism carries the same words back: the Spirit descending on Jesus (Matthew 3:16-17) echoes “my servant… my soul delights… my Spirit on him” (Isaiah 42:1).

The Muslim reading starts from how far the song reaches. The servant brings “justice to the nations” (Isaiah 42:1), and “the islands wait for his law” (Isaiah 42:4). Muslim presenters read that as a new body of law and argue Jesus brought none, citing his “Don't think that I came to destroy the law or the prophets. I didn't come to destroy, but to fulfill” (Matthew 5:17). Christian readers answer from the new covenant, whose scriptures call the Gospel's demand “the law of Christ” (Galatians 6:2). So what law the islands wait for is itself contested. The chorus's rejoicing reaches Arabia. Kedar is Ishmael's second son:

Kedar's descendants are Arabian tribes. Sela, in the same verse, is read by Muslim presenters as a mountain of Medina; that is a Muslim-tradition identification, unattested in the biblical text and its ancient versions, and elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible Sela names an Edomite locale (2 Kings 14:7). And one verb matters: the warrior of Isaiah 42:13 is Yahweh; the servant of verses 1-4 does not fight. ʿAlī al-Ṭabarī argued this reading in Religion and Empire, Ahmed Deedat popularized it, and Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya used arguments of this kind in a classical Muslim work (Hidāyat al-ḥayārā).

Critical scholars dispute whether the servant is Israel, an individual, a figure near Cyrus (the Persian king Isaiah names two chapters on, 44:28), or a messianic one, and the dispute is old and alive. What is known as a textual fact is narrower: the chapters around the song name Israel as the servant, and the chorus that includes Kedar does not identify the servant's homeland.