TRADITIONS IN TRANSFORMATION: The Ark of the Covenant and the Golden Calf in Biblical and Islamic Historiography

Islam, the youngest of the three monotheistic religions, represents a fairly advanced stage in the evolution of traditions which could already be encountered in Jewish and Christian sources. Since the l9th century and even earlier, scholars who noticed this well-known phenomenon, have usually confined themselves merely to asserting the Jewish or Christian origins of traditions recounted in the Islamic sources, without further investigating the new life that was infused into these traditions in the Islamic sphere. In the following, traditions of a clearly Biblical origin will be examined in their specif1c Islamic connotation, thus perhaps enabling us to gain more insight into the role the Biblical history of Israel plays in Islamic historical consciousness.2 This will serve to shed more light on the Islamic conviction that the divinely pre-ordained history of humankind which began with the People of Israel is continued through the history of Muhammad's community.3 For this investigation, the Ark of the Covenant and the Golden Calf have been chosen. These two ritual objects play a signif1cant role in Biblical and Qur'anic historiography, as well as in early Islamic tradition (hadlth). In spite of their contrasting ritual signif1cance (monotheistic as opposed to pagan), they have much in common as symbols of divinity, and in fact stand in an inverted symmetry to each other. The mutual role of these objects in Islam