Document Type : Original
Author
Assistant Professor of Department of Theology, Faculty of Law and Theology, Shahid Bahonar University of Kerman, Kerman, Iran,
Abstract
The present study investigates how Prophet Noah’s (AS) communicative actions are formulated and deployed in the Qur’anic and Torah narratives, and what semiotic–theological implications follow from their differences. Using Éric Landowski’s four interaction regimes (programmation, manipulation, ajustement, accident) as an analytic grid, the research adopts a comparative-textual methodology to treat communicative acts not only as narrative content but as interactional strategies embedded in each tradition’s theological and rhetorical economy. The analysis shows that the Qur’an depicts Noah’s communicative action as multi-layered and dynamic: programme-based commands are followed by prolonged attempts at persuasion and adaptive dialogue with the community, with rhetorical, emotional, and ethical resources mobilized to elicit conversion. The Torah account, in contrast, privileges a programme-oriented regime: God’s command and Noah’s precise execution are foregrounded while direct dialogic persuasion with the crowd remains largely absent; non-verbal, performative persuasion (the long public construction of the ark) and juridical proclamation substitute for extended speech. In both corpora the regime of accident—the flood itself—functions as the decisive semiotic event that suspends human interaction and reassigns meaning (judgment, covenant, renewal), yet its semantic load differs across texts. The findings indicate Landowski’s model is a productive tool for comparative sacred-text analysis and yields implications for theology, hermeneutics, and the semiotics of prophetic authority.
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