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 preceding 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 an attempt by Alexander to return to the water. 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. When his servant later tells him this, Moses declares that this was the place they had been seeking. As Tommaso 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>Tommaso 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>

The Syriac Alexander Song (also known as the memre, poem, or metrical homily about Alexander) has both the water of life episode and the legendary journeys of Alexander seen in the Syriac Alexander Legend. Gabriel Said Reynolds observes that the junction of the two seas to which Moses seeks to travel in Surah al-Kahf, as well as other passages that mention the two seas, most likely refer to the waters of the heavens and of the earth, and that "the two seas" is referred to with this meaning in other Syriac works. He provides a translation of the relevant sections from the Alexander Song: