- Complete lecture:    • The Qur’an: An Eternal Reminder  
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Qur'an 9:30: The Jews say: "Ezra ('Uzair) is Allah's son," and the Christians say: "The Messiah is the son of Allah." These are merely verbal assertions in imitation of the sayings of those unbelievers who preceded them. May Allah ruin them. How do they turn away from the Truth?

Muslims often get this wrong and its important to be aware of what it really says.

‘Uzair is the son of God’

What Jew believes Uzair is the son of God? I have never come across a Jew who believes that.

Some Muslims say it is Ezra the scribe who arrogated to himself semi-divine prerogatives when he reestablishing the text of the Torah after the Babylonian exile.

Uzair - Ezra doesn’t actually work if you look at the languages.

The best explanation which has been developed by many western historians including professor Gordon Newby in his book ‘A history of the Jews of Arabia’ is that it is not Ezra at all - its about Metatron (Yes Metatron!) - in medieval rabbinic Judaism it was assumed that in order to preserve that absolute unqualified unity of the Godhead you had to presuppose there was a kind of secondary emanation of god that was the conscious personal God that created the world and to whom you could pray. A subordinate deity. Metatron was indeed the object of worship of many medieval Jews. Dr Tim Winter says that at the library at Cambridge university are many medieval Jewish manuscripts that contain prayers to Metatron.

Gordon Newby and others have demonstrated that Uzair is associated with the prophet Enoch (Idris in the Qur’an) who is assimilated to Metatron in rabbinical piety.

So when the Quran says, the Jews say Uzair is the son of God, it’s saying they worship Metatron.

The Quran obviously does not approve. And some Jews didn’t either - Jews called the Karaites dismissed Rabbinical Judaism as polytheistic because of this Metatron idea.

So the Quran's polemic is directed against a medieval Jewish aberration rather than what you might find taught in an orthodox Jewish synagogue today. Dr Tim Winter says the Qur'an is NOT criticising Judaism as such but taking the Jewish Karaite view over against the Rabbinate view.

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