The Cave of Hira is a small cave on a mountain near Makkah. Before he became a prophet, Muhammad ﷺ would spend time there in quiet reflection and worship, seeking truth and contemplating the Creator.
At the age of forty, it was in this cave that he received the first revelation from God through the Angel Gabriel. This event marked the beginning of his prophethood and the revelation of the Qur'an, which continued over the next 23 years. The Qur'an opens the first revealed Codex Sinaiticus originally recorded 'Hira' in Isaiah 29:12, pinpointing the site of Prophet Muhammad's first revelationAyah with the command, "Read" or "Recite," calling people to seek knowledge and recognize God as their Creator (Qur'an 96:1-5). The Prophet Muhammad ﷺ described how the Angel Gabriel came to him in the Cave of Hira and delivered these first Ayat "An Angel came to him and asked him to read. Allah's Messenger (ﷺ) replied, "I do not know how to read." (Bukhari 4953).
In the 4th-century Codex Sinaiticus, one of the oldest surviving Christian Bibles, the original scribe (Scribe B) wrote the Greek word χιρα (chira) in the text of Isaiah 29:12. According to textual analysis, this word was originally a proper noun referring to a specific location. However, a later editor from the 7th century, known as corrector Cb3, modified the text by inserting two small letters[ an epsilon (ε) and a sigma (ς)] to transform the word into χειραϲ (cheiras), which means "hands". This specific corrector has a historically poor reputation among scholars, who describe his changes as "purely negative" and lacking any positive contribution to the original text.
When read without the later 7th-century edits, the Greek phrase
eis chira translates to "in Hira," indicating that a book would be
delivered to an unlearned man in that specific location. This discovery
aligns with the historical account of the first revelation given to a
man who could not read in the Cave of Hira in 610 AD. The 7th-century
modification may have been a deliberate attempt to obscure a geographic
reference that had become highly significant following the expansion of
Islam.
Isaiah 29:12
"And the Book will be delivered in Hira to an illiterate man, and one shall say to him: 'Read this', and he shall say: 'I'm not learned."
