Dhul-Qarnayn and the Sun Setting in a Muddy Spring - Part One: Difference between revisions

Newton quotes similar reports from other commentaries on 18:90.<ref name="P. Newton"></ref> These commentators or the reports that they quote understand these verses to mean literal setting and rising places. It is clear from the hadith contained in hadith collections and commentaries that there was interest in what happens to the sun when it is beyond view, so if Muhammad had given another interpretation there would surely be hadith to indicate as such, yet there is none.

It has been known since 1890 thanks to Theodore Nöldeke that there is a very close similarity between the account in the Qur’an of Dhu’l Qarnayn and the Alexander Legend. This was written in Syriac, probably around 630 CE, but incorporates older traditions such as that of the iron gate built by Alexander dating to at least the time of the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus in the 1^st century CE<ref>Van Bladel 2007b op. cit. p.181 (See Flavius Josephus, The Wars of the Jews, Book VII, Chapter VII, Verse 4)</ref> and journeys to the rising and setting place of the sun from the Epic of Gilgamesh.<ref>See Epic of Gilgamesh, [http://www.ancienttexts.org/library/mesopotamian/gilgamesh/tab9.htm Tablet IX] and [http://www.ancienttexts.org/library/mesopotamian/gilgamesh/tab1.htm Tablet I] (Van Bladel 2007b op. cit. p.176 & p.197, note 6)</ref>