The Qurʾān references Biblical prophecies that supposedly predict the coming of the Prophet Muḥammad. One such reference is found in Sūra al-aʿrāf v.157, where the coming of an ʾummī prophet is said to have been prophesied in the Jewish Bible.

The Qurʾān states that this prophet, who is Prophet Muḥammad, is found “written with them” (that is, with the Jews) in al-Taurāt. That the Qurʾān is appealing to a contemporary biblical text is obvious- the question is, what is it?

This essay argues in favor of the hypothesis that Q7:157-158 is a probable allusion to the text of 2^nd Isaiah. The book of Isaiah has traditionally been ascribed wholly to the prophetic figure of Isaiah, the 8th Century BC prophet active during the Assyrian crisis, during which Judah was reduced to a vassal state under the Assyrian empire. Modern biblical scholarship, however, has uncovered at-least three separate authors on the basis of linguistic, thematic and historical distinctions therein. By scholarly consensus, most of chapters 1-39 can be reasonably attributed to the historical Isaiah of the 8th Century BC, while chapters 40-55 belong to an anonymous prophet active amidst one of the Jewish communities forcefully settled in Babylon after the destruction of Jerusalem by the Neo-Babylonians in 587BC.

Second Isaiah predicts the restoration of Israel and the return of the Israelites back to Jerusalem following the conquests of Cyrus the Persian. The prophecy is intermingled with strong polemic against the worship of idols and oracles predicting the fall of Babylon. The prophet looks to a future where Israel has an “everlasting” covenant with Yahveh