ld, in despair, unable to endure watching him die. God promises to make Ishmael father of a great nation. The boy is saved. Arab nations claim descent from Ishmael. (Chaim Potok, p.32)Similarly, God intervenes to save Sarahs son Isaac from the sacrificial knife of Abraham in the famous test of his faith. The Hebrew people claim descent from Isaac. In this paper, I will examine the beliefs and practices of Judaism, and Islam, with the view that these two brothers common origins and ideas are more significant than their obvious differences.Starting with Judaism we see Abraham is regarded by his people as the first Jew, however a better case can be made for regarding Moses as the founder of Judaism. Born in roughly the 14th century B.C.E., Moses was raised in anonymity in the court of the Egyptian pharaoh Seti I, having been saved from a decree ordering the death of all new-born Hebrew males. Moses thus had an Egyptian upbringing, and the basic belief in a universal God that some say may have been related to the experimental monotheism of an earlier pharaoh, Akhenaton: About a century before Moses, the pharaoh of an Egypt swollen with the spoils of empire envisioned a single god, one natural force at work upon the suffocating multiplicity of gods and men His name was cursed; his god was obliterated. There can be no connection between that pharaoh and the man tending the flock in the wilderness other than that both are of the same species, both reached for a unity beyond the wearying kaleidoscope we wake to each morning.(Encyclopedia Britannica, p.165)Perhaps there is no connection, but it should be remembered that currents of monotheism were running in the ancient world outside Mesopotamia and Judea. Moses claim as the founder of Judaism is based on his role as a prophet of God, as receiver of the tablets of law, which form the basis of the Jewish covenant or pact with God. The Mosaic Law is the ethical basis of Judaism, and i...
