The findings of the foregoing chapters may be summarised at three levels: the Children of Israel, the Arab believers, and Bible and Qurʾān.

The Children of Israel

The traditions about the Children of Israel reveal tension between two contrasting aspects of their image: righteousness and sin, the latter evidently being the predominant one. The righteous aspect is apparent mainly in traditions employing Jewish messianic ideas, and especially the hope for a renewed Israelite conquest of the Promised Land (Chapter 1). In their Islamic presentation, these ideas are embedded in a common Jewish-Arab messianism, which seems to be the historiographical out- come of an apologetic need to legitimise the Islamic conquest of Syria. This emerges in traditions that present the conquest as a renewed exodus fulfilling a predestined Biblical scheme aimed at providing the Jews with their deliverance through the Arabs. Such traditions were designed to form the retrospective memory of the Arab conquest of al-Sham as an act of Jewish deliverance supported by “Judeo-Muslim” Israelites like Kaʿb al-Aḥbār. The same messianic notions were also applied to the eschatological sphere of the clash with the Byzantines, and an active part was assigned here to the Israelite Lost Tribes, which were expected to return as valiant warriors helping the Arabs to confront the Byzantines and take Constantinople.

Jewish messianism has also been retained in traditions extending to Arabia the status of a sacred land, which was designed to counterbalance the status of al-Sham as the Promised Land (Chapter 2). These traditions present the Ḥijāz as a destination for Israelite pilgrimage and as the focus of the religious orientation of the Israelite Lost Tribes.

The sinful image of the Israelites, however, is more prevalent in our sources; this comes out in traditions focused more on the history of the Israelites than on their messianic dreams. This history is marked by sins that caused the people of Israel to lose to the Arabs their status of a chosen community (Chapters 3–5). The sins are idolatry (mainly the worship of the calf), rebellion and inner division. These became the chief model of evil which was repeated within Islamic society, thus making the Israelites a symbol of deviation from the good sunna of the Prophet, and of assimilation with others (Chapters 6-10).