Dhul-Qarnayn and the Alexander Romance: Difference between revisions

In addition to the Dhu'l Qarnayn episode and its relationship with the Syriac Alexander legend, the immediately preceeding story about Moses in Surah al Kahf has long been noticed to derive from another story in the Alexander Romance tradition about Alexander's quest to find the water imparting immortality, featuring his cook, a dead fish that springs back to life from this water and escapes, and a wise sage. In {{Quran-range|18|60-65}}, Moses travels to the junction of the two seas with his servant, who later realises that they have left their fish behind there, which has come back to life and swam away through a passage. Moses then meets a sage who imparts wisdom to him. As Tomasso Tesei notes, "The most ancient versions of this story are found in three sources preceding or contemporaneous to the rise of Islam: the Rec. β of the Alexander Romance (fourth/fifth century), the Babylonian  Talmud (Tamīd, 32a–32b), and the so-called Syriac Alexander Song (ca. 630–635)".<ref>Tomasso Tesei (2015) [https://www.almuslih.org/Library/Tesei,%20T%20-%20Some%20Cosmological%20Notions%20from%20Late%20Antiquity.pdf Some Cosmological Notions from Late Antiquity in Q 18:60–65: The Quran in Light of Its Cultural Context] Journal of the American Oriental Society 135.1</ref>