The same formula returns in 2:47 and 2:122. The stories that follow concern Israel’s ancient past—Moses, Pharaoh, the calf, the covenant—but the people being commanded to remember, believe, pray, and fulfill the covenant are being addressed in the present. Banī Isrāʾīl in the Quran does not appear to be a distant people but the direct audience recieving the Quran.
The more interesting evidence comes from the word ummī. Muhammad’s audience is famously described this way:
62:2 He is the One who raised among the ummiyyūn a messenger from among themselves, reciting to them His revelations, purifying them, and teaching them the Book and wisdom.
Ummī is often rendered “gentile,” and sometimes understood to mean a people outside the biblical scriptural tradition. But that interpretation creates a problem in . In the middle of the Quran’s discussion of the scriptural community, it says:
2:78 And among them are ummiyyūn who do not know the Book except through hearsay, and they only conjecture.
The important phrase is simply وَمِنْهُمْ أُمِّيُّونَ — “and among them are ummiyyūn.” This signifies that the ummiyun cannot by itself designate someone genealogically outside the Children of Israel. The Quran can use it for people within the scripture-associated population who nevertheless do not know the Book. This is exactly what we can extract in the following verse, where the ummiyyin are contrasted to those who were given the scripture.
3:20 If they argue with you, then say, “I have simply submitted myself to GOD; I and those who follow me.” You shall proclaim to those who received the scripture, as well as the ummiyyin, “Would you submit?” If they submit, then they have been guided, but if they turn away, your sole mission is to deliver this message. GOD is Seer of all people.
That becomes significant when 62:2 identifies the people among whom Muhammad arose as ummiyyūn. The contrast may therefore be less between “Israelites” and “gentile Arabs” than between those who possess and know scripture and those who do not.
There is another reason to take this seriously. The description of Muhammad’s mission in 62:2 closely reproduces the prayer made by Abraham and Ishmael at the Sacred House:
2:128 “Our Lord, make us submitters to You, and from our descendants a community submitting to You.”
They then ask:
2:129 “Our Lord, raise among them a messenger from among themselves, who will recite to them Your revelations, teach them the Book and wisdom, and purify them.”
62:2 …A messenger from among themselves, reciting to them His revelations, purifying them, and teaching them the Book and wisdom.”
The verbal correspondence is unmistakable. The messenger requested in 2:129 is to come “from among them” ( minhum); the messenger of 62:2 comes “from among them” ( minhum). Both recite God’s revelations, teach the Book and wisdom, and purify their people. The Quran appears to present Muhammad’s mission as the realization of Abraham and Ishmael’s prayer for their descendants.
The evidence therefore supports a narrower claim. The Quran does not give us the clean division assumed by the later genealogy: Israelites through Isaac on one side, and the Arabs of Mecca through Ishmael on the other. It never identifies Quraysh as Ishmaelites. Instead, it addresses living Children of Israel, recognizes ummiyyūn among a people connected with scripture, and describes Muhammad’s mission among the ummiyyūn in language that deliberately recalls Abraham and Ishmael’s prayer for a messenger from among their descendants.
That does not establish that the Meccans were Children of Israel. But it makes the possibility textually viable—and it means that the later claim that Quraysh descended through Ishmael rather than Israel cannot simply be read backward into the Quran as though the Quran itself had said it.
Jews and Israelites in Arabia
Whatever the ancestry of the Meccans themselves, Arabia was not cut off from the wider Israelite and Jewish world. Jewish communities were established across the peninsula centuries before Islam, from the northern Hijaz to Yemen. What is harder to determine is how those communities came to be there: whether they descended from Israelite migrants, from local Arab populations that adopted Judaism, or—as is probably more realistic—from some combination of the two.
Tayma, in the northern Hijaz, provides some of the earliest evidence of this broader environment. The Babylonian king Nabonidus made the oasis his residence for roughly a decade in the sixth century BCE. A later Jewish text found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Prayer of Nabonidus, places the king in Tayma and describes his encounter with a Jewish exorcist. The text itself is later than Nabonidus, so it cannot establish a Jewish community there in his lifetime, but it shows that Tayma had entered Jewish memory well before Islam.
Farther south, Yathrib (Medina) and Khaybar were home to substantial Jewish communities by the time of Muhammad. The early Islamic sources describe tribes such as Banū Qurayẓa, Banū al-Naḍīr, and Banū Qaynuqāʿ in Yathrib and a major Jewish population at Khaybar. Significantly, Muslim historians themselves preserved competing explanations of their origins. Some traditions traced them to Israelites who had migrated into Arabia—occasionally even assigning priestly ancestry—while others regarded them as Arab tribes that had adopted Judaism. The disagreement is itself instructive: their Jewish identity was not in question, but their biological ancestry already was.
The clearest evidence from southern Arabia comes from Ḥimyar in Yemen. By late antiquity, its rulers had abandoned the old South Arabian pantheon for a monotheistic religion increasingly associated with Judaism. Fifth- and sixth-century inscriptions invoke the God of Israel and employ explicitly Jewish language, while external Christian sources likewise describe the kingdom as Jewish. By the eve of Islam, Judaism was therefore not a foreign religion confined to scattered immigrants. It had become part of Arabia’s political and religious landscape.
What the evidence does not allow us to do is draw a clean line between “Israelite settlers” and “Arab converts.” Ancient populations rarely worked that way. Migration, intermarriage, conversion, tribal incorporation, and political alliance could all change a community’s identity over generations. Even the biblical conception of Israel allows outsiders to be incorporated into the covenantal people, while Israelites themselves are repeatedly depicted as dispersing among neighboring populations.
The historical point, then, is not that every Jewish community in Arabia can be shown to descend biologically from ancient Israel. It is that Israelite and Jewish populations had a real and longstanding presence within Arabia, and the boundary between “Arab” and “Israelite” was never necessarily as absolute as later genealogical schemes make it appear.
Road Two: History and Archaeology
Here we set the Bible and Quran aside as sources and ask what can be shown independently.
Abraham is not on the table
No inscription, king list, or archaeological find mentions Abraham, Ishmael, Isaac, or Jacob. This is the ordinary situation for figures of the early second millennium BCE who appear only in later traditions, and it does not prove they did not exist. It does mean that a claim of biological descent from Ishmael cannot be tested by tracing lines back to him. There is no endpoint to trace to.
What can be tested is a weaker and still significant claim: that the peoples Genesis assigns to Ishmael were real Arabian groups whose names are attested independently.
Ishmael’s sons on the Assyrian map
This is where the historical road is strongest, and it favors the Genesis list.
Several names in Genesis 25:13-15 correspond to Arabian peoples and places known from Assyrian royal inscriptions of the eighth and seventh centuries BCE:
Kedar ( Qidri, Qedar) appears repeatedly as a powerful Arab confederation, and in the Assyrian records Qedarite rulers, including queens, deal with the Assyrian kings. A fifth-century BCE silver bowl from Egypt names “Qaynu son of Geshem, king of Qedar,” and this Geshem is probably the “Geshem the Arab” who opposed Nehemiah.
Tema is Tayma, the oasis already mentioned.
Dumah matches Adummatu, the oasis later called Dumat al-Jandal.
Massa appears as a tribute-paying Arabian group under Tiglath-pileser III.
Jetur is generally connected with the later Itureans.
Nebaioth is probably the Nabaiati of Ashurbanipal’s annals, although the equation with the later Nabataeans is debated on linguistic grounds and should be stated as a possibility only.
The Keturah list shows the same effect. Ephah (Genesis 25:4) appears in Tiglath-pileser’s records as an Arabian group, and Sheba and Dedan are the well-known Sabaean and Dadanite polities.
The best reading is that Genesis 25 preserves an authentic ethnographic memory of the tribal map of northern Arabia in the first millennium BCE, organized as a family tree. That is real evidence that the Bible’s authors knew these peoples, and it is consistent with Arabian tribes being grouped, in Israelite memory, under the name of Ishmael. It is not evidence that they were biologically descended from a single man. Genealogy of this sort is how ancient tribal societies recorded alliance, proximity, and shared identity.
What Mecca does and doesn’t give us
When the question narrows to Mecca and Quraysh, the historical record becomes thin.
Mecca has not been excavated in any systematic way, since the sacred precinct is closed to archaeology, and therefore almost no pre-Islamic inscriptions have been allowed to be uncovered at Mecca or Medina. Ilkka Lindstedt has stressed the unevenness of the epigraphic record, in which far more survives from other parts of western and northern Arabia than from the Hijaz’s two best-known towns. Patricia Crone’s 1987 study of Meccan trade showed how little independent evidence there is for Mecca’s pre-Islamic prominence, and the debate her book began has not been resolved.
So the history of Mecca before Muhammad is known mainly through Islamic-era sources. We can say that Arabian peoples were present across the Hijaz, that they are attested in inscriptions from Dadan to Hegra, and that Jewish communities lived in the region. We cannot say who the ancestors of the Quraysh were, or reconstruct the population of seventh-century Mecca.
Genetics
Modern DNA studies of Arabian populations show regional structure, deep West Asian ancestry, and varying contributions from Africa and South Asia. They are valuable for understanding migration and admixture. They cannot answer the Ishmael question, for three reasons.
First, there is no ancient DNA from pre-Islamic Mecca, and modern Arabian populations have been reshaped by centuries of pilgrimage, trade, slavery, and migration.
Second, “Levantine-related ancestry” is not “Israelite ancestry.” The Levantine genetic signal predates Israel by millennia and is shared widely.
Third, a single paternal haplogroup is one line among thousands of ancestors. Popular claims that a particular Y-chromosome lineage marks “Abraham’s descendants” stretch coalescence estimates, which carry wide uncertainty, onto a named individual whom no genetic method can identify.
The same limits apply to the Israelite question. Genetics cannot separate a Meccan of Ishmaelite lineage from one of Israelite lineage, because both would sit inside the same regional ancestry.
Genealogy as social technology
One final historical observation matters for how to read every chart discussed above. Arabian genealogy served social functions: it defined who could ally with whom, who owed blood-money, who shared grazing rights. Ibn Khaldun made this point in the fourteenth century, arguing that what binds a tribe is the sense of kinship and mutual support, and that outsiders were routinely absorbed into a lineage over time. Genealogies were edited as alliances shifted. This is why the Qahtanite and Adnanite scheme, the gap between Kedar and ʿAdnān, and the competing candidates for Quraysh’s ancestor all coexist in the tradition. They are not corrupted copies of a single original. They are the working records of a society that used descent as a language.
Putting the Roads Together
What follows
The title question, taken at face value, is the wrong shape. It assumes that “Arab” names one people, that “Ishmael” names a single testable ancestor, and that descent from Ishmael and descent from Israel are exclusive alternatives. None of those assumptions survives contact with the sources.
What survives is more interesting. Genesis 25 captures a real tribal landscape and files it under Ishmael’s name. The Bible’s own family trees braid Arabian and Israelite lines together, in Mibsam and Mishma, in the Midianite household of Moses, in the Hagrite wars of the eastern tribes. Israel, as the Bible and the Quran both describe it, was a covenant people that scattered, absorbed, and was absorbed, and Arabia was one of the places it went. Jewish communities in the Hijaz and Yemen are historically certain. Mecca’s own population before Muhammad is, for now, beyond reach of any method.
Within the Quran’s own frame, the opposition between “Ishmael’s children” and “Israel’s children” does not look like the fault line it became in later polemic. Both are Abraham’s offspring, the prayer of 2:128-129 is spoken by the fathers of both lines, and the audience is addressed in the vocabulary of both. A reading in which the first recipients of the Quran stood inside the wider Children of Israel is coherent, and algins with historical and Biblical claims, but is achieved by abduction, an inference to the best explanation, and not by an explicit claim.