Chapter 2: The Journey Begins

Now that I have set the scene, let me take you on this my journey through a part of the book that over a billion people believe in, but only a small proportion ever looked inside, and even less are familiar with or understand its contents.
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We Have Three Cows

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The journey through “The Cow” (“Al Baqara”) begins with its name, which is derived, like in most other surahs, from a matter that is discussed within that surah. In our case, verses 67-73 relate an alleged exchange between Moses and the Children of Israel regarding a cow that God is asking the Children of Israel to sacrifice.
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I looked for the biblical narrative alluded to in this passage, and found much discrepancy. The Bible contains 2 different passages about a cow that is to be ritually slaughtered: One is the Red Heifer mentioned in the Book of Numbers, and the other is a female calf that is used when a body of a slain person is found in the field and the killer’s identity is unknown, in the Book of Deuteronomy.
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The Quranic account contains some elements from both biblical passages, mixed together. It appears that the authors of the Quran were not aware that there are two different sacrificial cows in the Bible, nor were they familiar with the biblical narrative which they related.
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As you will see when we arrive at these verses further in this book, we end up with a choice of three cows: the Red Heifer, the Female Calf, and the Quranic Yellow/Golden/Tan Cow.
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The one common theme in all three passages is that of Moses relating God’s instructions to the people regarding the ritual slaughter of a relatively young Cow.
Islamic doctrine maintains that the earlier scriptures originally contained the Quranic version, but were altered (corrupted) by wicked Jewish and Christian scholars after the appearance of the Quran.
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No valid reason is offered as to why it happened, or why certain passages were altered while others were not. This claim is made in verse 75 of our surah, and the doctrine is called Tah’rif. I will discuss the topic in more detail when we reach it.
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Some commentators claim that “The Cow” is named after the Golden Calf, mentioned in a few places in the surah, which is without foundation. Besides, the Golden Calf is referred to in the Quran as “Ijl”, not as “Baqara”.
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Their motivation is most likely to divert the reader’s attention from the multiple Cow mix-up.
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The Quran’s Mysterious Letters

And now, to the text:
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2:1 “A L M”. Many surahs begin with some letters. Only our surah dedicates a separate verse to these letters. In other surahs, where these letters appear, they come before verse 1, and some English translators mark them as verse zero.
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The purpose or the meaning of these letters is unknown, and when reciting them, Muslims should add “And Allah knows what you do not know”.
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Most Islamic commentators just classify these letters as miracles of Allah. A tradition, however, exists (Sira:377-378), which relates an exchange between Muhammad’s supporters and some unbelieving Jews who used to annoy Muhammad with their questions, where these letters represented in their numerical value the number of years that Muhammad’s kingdom and religion would last (e.g. A=1, L=30, M=40). Muhammad kept supplying his supporters with extra letters until the number reached was 734 years.
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The discussion is then abandoned, with a somewhat incoherent verse (3:7) brought down by Allah to end the argument, stating that the plain verses are the “Mother of the Book”, or “Umm al-Kitab”, and everything else, including these letters, I presume, is obscure.
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And that brings us back to “Allah knows what you don’t know”, which incidentally appears quite frequently in the Quran in one form or another, either to discourage inquiry, or to dismiss obscure or incoherent text.
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Curiously, the system of assigning numerical (gematrical) value to Arabic letters seems to be based on that of the Hebrew alphabet. It is referred to as the “Abjad” order. A, B, J (or G), D are the first four letters in the Hebrew alphabet. The Arabic one is A, B, T, Th.