The Qibla: An Allusion to the Shemaʿ

In this article it is argued that the Qibla passages in the Qurʾan, which are commonly understood as referring to the direction of the prayer, are directly engaging with and interpreting the Shemaʿ passages in Deuteronomy and their Talmudic commentaries. By defining and applying the method of intertextual polysemy, nine points of intertextuality are identified between the various Quranic, Biblical, and Talmudic passages. Against this background, the article implies that narrations from traditional Quranic commentaries are lacking in their interpretation of these passages, since they do not employ any extra-Quranic contexts to explain their meaning. Through the method of intertextual polysemy, the alternative thesis propound-ed here is that the historical reference for the Qibla passages is the Shemaʿ.