On the textual preservation and oral corruption of the Torah👇🏻

Ibn ʿAbd al-Barr [d. 463 AH] commented on the famous ḥadīth regarding the stoning of the Jewish adulterers:

❝And in this ḥadīth of jurisprudence: the permissibility of asking the People of the Book about their Book, and there is in that evidence that the Torah in their hands is authentic, and were it not so, the Messenger of Allah ﷺ would not have asked them about it nor called for it.

And in what we have mentioned, there is proof that the book which they used to write with their own hands and then say, {This is from Allah,} refers to the books of their rabbis, jurists, and monks. They would compose books for them from their opinions and desires and attribute them to Allah, the Almighty and Majestic.

Because of this and similar ambiguities in their matter, we were prohibited from affirming what they narrate or denying anything from it, lest we affirm falsehood or deny truth, for they have mixed truth with falsehood.

And whoever verifies something from the Torah through the transmission of the likes of Ibn Salām and others from the Jewish scholars who embraced Islām—it is permissible for him to read it and act upon what is in it, so long as it does not contradict what is in our Sharīʿa from our Book and the Sunnah of our Prophet ﷺ. Do you not see the statement of ʿUmar ibn al-Khaṭṭāb when he said to Kaʿb: “If you know that it is the Torah which Allah revealed to Mūsa ibn ʿImrān at Mount Sinai, then read it during the hours of the night and the hours of the day.”

And we have dedicated a separate chapter to this meaning, in the disapproval of reading the books of the People of the Book, which we mentioned at the end of Kitāb al-ʿIlm, and it will satisfy the one who examines it, if Allah wills.

And in this ḥadīth also, there is evidence that they used to lie about their Torah and attribute those lies of theirs to their Lord and their Book, because they said that they find in the Torah that adulterers are to be exposed and flogged, whether they are married by lawful marriage or unmarried, while in the Torah, there is something else—that married adulterers are to be stoned.

And in it, there is also proof that the laws of those before us are laws for us, except for what has been abrogated or contradicted in the Qur'ān or in the Sunnah of the Prophet Muḥammad ﷺ, and that we are only prohibited from studying the Torah because the Jews who have the Torah in their hands are not trustworthy regarding it, due to what they altered and changed from it. But whoever knows from it what ʿUmar said to Kaʿb al-Aḥbār, it is permissible for him to read it.❞

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