In Chapters 1 and 2, the tribes of Israel were seen in messianic traditions presenting them as valiant warriors and righteous believers, in fact, as “Judeo-Muslims”. In this excursus traces of them will be sought in other fields of Islamic tradition. Such traces have survived in the realm of dietary law, and the image of the tribes is different here. They do not return in a messianic event of redemption, but rather survive as mice or lizards, having been turned into these animals because of God's wrath, which means that they are sinners. A survey of the traditions about the survival of the Israelites as mice and lizards will demonstrate the prevalence of the Jews’ sinful image in the eyes of the Muslims, and will at the same time unveil further aspects of the literary tension between the Bible and the Qurʾan.

The basic notion of the relevant traditions is that mice and lizards are survivors of the ancient Children of Israel, which renders their meat forbidden. The legal aspects of these traditions have already been studied by Michael Cook, and the following discussion will concentrate on how the Israelites are treated in these traditions.

The tribes of Israel are represented in the traditions by two different sets of terms describing them and their fate. In one set, the “Biblical” one, the terms are the originally Hebrew words sibṭ (a “tribe”) or sibṭān (“two tribes“), and their fate is described by a series of verbs derived from the roots f.q.d., d.l.l. and h.l.k. All three revolve around the notion of getting lost. This set will be referred to as the “Biblical” one because it clearly draws on the Biblical-Talmudic myth of the Lost Tribes that dwell beyond the Sabbatic River. In the second set, the terms describing the Israelites are clearly Qurʾānic: the tribes are depicted as an umma, and their fate is maskh, which in the present context clearly denotes metamorphosis. Such an idea is Qurʾānic, because the Qur'ān speaks about Israelites being punished by being transformed into animals (Chapter 10).

It is noteworthy that the form sibṭ—which belongs to the vocabulary defined as Biblical here-never occurs in the Qurʾan, while the form asbāt, when explicitly referring to the twelve tribes of Israel, is glossed by the more familiar Qurʾānic term umam (7:160). This seems to indicate that the significance of the Qurʾānic asbāṭ in the sense of “tribes” was never entirely clear to readers of the Qurʾān. In fact, the Qurʾānic asbāṭ was occasionally taken to stand for an individual proper name.