A story often told about the Arabic root br’, in the sense of “create,” used several times in he Qur’an to refer to God’s creation of the world, is that it derives from an improper analysis on Muhammad’s part of the Hebrew title for Genesis, bre’shit (lit. “in the head/beginning”). The tendency of a story like this is, obviously enough, not only to paint Muhammad as the confector of a new religion out of borrowed plumage, but also to make him seem incompetent besides.
Arthur Jeffery, in The Foreign Vocabulary of the Qur’an, ignores this account on the good philological grounds that bar’ is itself attested as a root meaning “create” in Hebrew, Syriac, and Aramaic, all three of which languages deploy it in a theological sense similar to the one it has in the Qur’an. While Jeffery is carefully agnostic about whether the Qur’an should be read as an inspired document or a pious fraud, the tenor of his explanations in The Vocabulary (“borrowed from the Christians to the North,” “borrowed from the Syriac liturgy”) suggests that, as a scholar, he hews to the latter opinion or something like it. Charitably, one could imagine Jeffery thinking of the Qur’an as an original composition out of the rich and syncretic religious vocabulary then current in the trading towns of Arabia.
I don’t mean to impugn this opinion, which would in any case be well-supported by many other lexical items. The particular case of br’, though, leads me to sound a note of caution as to over-easy assumptions of “foreign” influence on the language of the Qur’an – where this means, as it usually does, influence from the literate religious cultures of Syria and Ethiopia. In my Sabaic dictionary, I find that br’ appears from a fairly early date in Sabaean inscriptions with meanings that range from “create” to “build” (should it then be considered an r/n doublet of bny?). These early witnesses in a language little-known to Jeffery (because, in 1938, it was little-known to anyone) but closely linked to Arabic suggest that the hypothesis of religiously-motivated borrowing advanced by him should be discarded. Most of the texts the dictionary cites show br’ being used in an everyday context, for the building projects of individuals or communities. I find it difficult to imagine that this usage could result from semantic extension out of a primarily religious meaning; the more likely hypothesis is that the everyday usage came first, and the religious usage built upon it. For comparison, consider the still pretty narrow semantic field of xlq, the main Qur’anic root for “divine creation,” and, on the other side, the way that an Old English poem like Caedmon’s Hymn appropriates everyday “building words” to describe God’s making of the world.
If br’ already exists in the languages of the Arabian Peninsula by the second century CE, then it makes little sense to talk about a religiously-motivated borrowing of the word out of other Semitic languages for the Qur’an; in this case, the Qur’an is just using material that’s already on hand. One could still speak of the Qur’an’s use of br’ as influenced by the root’s specialized meaning in Christian or Jewish liturgy, but, since the root has already expanded from “build” to “create” in the Sabaic documentation, I’m not sure what additional explanatory value such a hypothesis would have.
The case of br’ shows how necessary caution is in appraising hypotheses of interlinguistic influence or borrowing, especially if these hypotheses – as is the case with most such arguments about the Qur’an – have a polemical intent behind them, and especially if this polemical intent is one with which we might otherwise be disposed to agree. There’s a broader lesson here, too, for anyone doing philology on a language that, for one reason or another, seems to be “poor in history.” Whether we’re dealing with Homeric Greek or Qur’anic Arabic, the paucity of antecedents for a language makes it easy to suggest borrowings or foreign influence without fear of contradiction. Contradictory evidence, though (Linear B, the Sabaic Inscriptions) has a way of cropping up. We should be cautious about alleging borrowing, especially motivated borrowing, unless one or both of the following circumstances hold: the word in question refers to a concept that can also be plausibly thought to be borrowed (as, for instance, qur’an itself), or the word violates the borrowing language’s phonotactic and morphological rules.