Bible 'prophecies of Muhammad' rebutted

Deuteronomy 18:18: I will raise up for them a prophet like you from among their brothers. And I will put my words in his mouth, and he shall speak to them all that I command him. The dawah claim is that like Moses fits Muhammad better than Jesus.

The context overrules the claim. Deuteronomy 17:15 — written immediately before — restricts the king/prophet to one from among your brothers; you may not put a foreigner over you, who is not your brother. Brothers in Deuteronomic Hebrew (aḥekā) refers to fellow Israelites, not Ishmaelites. The Israelite community throughout the Hebrew Bible distinguishes Israel (descendants of Jacob/Israel) from Ishmael (cf. Genesis 21:13 — Ishmael as the son of the slave woman; Genesis 25:18 — Ishmaelites dwelling east of Egypt).

The New Testament's own application is decisive. Acts 3:22-23 — Peter at Solomon's portico — applies Deuteronomy 18:18 explicitly to Jesus: Moses said, "The Lord God will raise up for you a prophet like me from your brothers." Acts 7:37 — Stephen before the Sanhedrin — does the same. The earliest church read the verse Christologically, in continuity with Israel, and the chronology, the genealogy, and the Mosaic typology all fit Jesus better than Muhammad: born under foreign occupation; delivered his people; spoke God's words directly; was rejected by his own; performed signs and wonders; was the mediator of a new covenant.

Song of Songs 5:16: His mouth is most sweet, and he is altogether desirable (Hebrew machamaddim). The dawah claim, popularised by Ahmed Deedat, is that machamaddim is a Hebrew form of Muhammad.

The Hebrew refutes the claim. Machamaddim (מַחֲמַדִּים) is the plural of machamad — a common Hebrew noun meaning desirable thing or delight. The -im ending is the standard Hebrew plural, not a personal-name suffix. The same root ḥmd is used elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible without any reference to a person: Lamentations 2:4 — the delights of the eye; Hosea 9:6 — machmadeihem, their treasured things; 1 Kings 20:6 — every desirable thing of the king's house. None of these is read as a personal name in Hebrew.

Song of Songs is a love poem. The beloved's mouth is described as sweet and the beloved as altogether desirable. The Hebrew vocabulary is descriptive, not onomastic. To read machamaddim as a name is to apply a translation rule that would similarly turn every Hebrew noun ending in -im into a proper name.

Isaiah 29:11-12: And the vision of all this has become to you like the words of a book that is sealed. When men give it to one who can read, saying, "Read this," he says, "I cannot, for it is sealed." And when they give the book to one who cannot read, saying, "Read this," he says, "I cannot read." The dawah claim is that one who cannot read is Muhammad receiving the Qurʼān at Ḥirāʼ (Bukhārī 3 — I am not a reader).

The context refutes it. Isaiah 29 is judgment on Jerusalem. The whole oracle from Isaiah 29:1 onward is addressed to Ariel, the city where David encamped; the sealed book is a metaphor for the spiritual blindness of Judah, not a future encounter in seventh-century Arabia. Verses 13-14 continue: this people draw near with their mouth and honour me with their lips, while their hearts are far from me. The whole passage is internal-Israelite indictment. To extract a single verse and apply it to Muhammad is to ignore the addressee, the genre, and the surrounding text.

The biblical tests for a prophet. Deuteronomy 13:1-5: even a prophet whose signs come true is to be rejected if he calls Israel to go after other gods. Deuteronomy 18:21-22: a true prophet's predictions come to pass. The Christian's own test is whether the prophet's message accords with what Yahweh has already revealed. Muhammad's message — denying the deity of Christ, the Trinity, and the cross — fails the Deuteronomy 13 test by the standard of every prior biblical revelation. This is not a polemical add-on; it is the Bible's own filter for prophetic claims.