According to The Book of Light, the Sabeans—known as Sabians in the Quran—represent one of the most overlooked and enigmatic populations in sacred history. While the Hebrew Bible principally follows the lineage descending from Adam and Eve, The Book of Light proposes that a pre-Adamic human population already existed outside the Garden of Eden: the Sabeans, a distinct order of humanity created during the first stage of creation on the sixth day in Genesis Chapter 1.
Remarkably, the Sabeans appear by that designation only three times in the Hebrew Bible (Job 1:15; Isaiah 45:14; Joel 3:8). The Arabic Quran likewise names the Sabians only three times (The Quran 2:62; 5:69; 22:17). Yet neither sacred record provides an extended explanation of who these mysterious people were. They simply appear within the respective narratives without any explanation of their origin or identity, leaving the question of who they were to later generations.
Within biblical scholarship, the Sabeans have commonly been associated with the Sabaeans—the inhabitants of Saba, or Sheba, the ancient kingdom famously associated with the Queen of Sheba. The Book of Light, however, questions whether these populations should automatically be regarded as identical. Sheba already appears throughout the Hebrew Scriptures as an identifiable name, people, and geographical tradition, whereas the comparatively obscure Sabeans appear independently within passages such as Job 1:15, Isaiah 45:14, and Joel 3:8. Rather than assuming that the similarity of these names establishes their identity, The Book of Light examines the possibility that the Sabeans represent an altogether different and considerably older population.
The mystery becomes even more pronounced in the Quran. The Sabians are named alongside recognizable religious communities—including believers, Jews, Christians, and Magians—yet the Quran never pauses to explain who they are (The Quran 2:62; 5:69; 22:17). Their identity has consequently remained a longstanding problem within Islamic interpretation, producing competing attempts to associate them with various ancient peoples and religious communities. The Book of Light approaches the mystery from a different direction: rather than beginning with the assumption that the Sabians must have originated as a later religious sect or civilization, the book asks whether their history reaches considerably farther back—to the earliest creation of mankind itself.
Their origin, according to the book’s reconstructed chronology, is preserved within the familiar declaration:
“Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness” (Genesis 1:26).
The Book of Light interprets the plural language—“Us” and “Our”—as referring to the Most High GOD and HIS Helpers collectively participating in the sixth-day creation. The Quran similarly employs plural language when describing the six-day creation of the heavens, the Earth, and everything between them:
“Indeed, We created the heavens and the earth and everything in between in six days, and We were not touched with fatigue” (The Quran 50:38).
Within the book’s framework, this first creation produced not Adam and Eve, but the original Sabean population. And it was a population—not a single man or a couple. Genesis describes mankind being created collectively as male and female, blessed, commanded to multiply and replenish the Earth, and given dominion over its living creatures (Genesis 1:26-28). Only afterward does Genesis Chapter 2 turn to the separate creation of the man, Adam, as an individual formed from the dust and placed within the Garden of Eden (Genesis 2:7-8).
According to The Book of Light, the Sabeans were created throughout the Earth as a global human population distributed across all seven continents. They were not one race, ethnicity, language, or civilization. Rather, they became the progenitors of the world’s many non-Hebrew peoples, eventually giving rise to the diverse races, cultures, languages, nations, and civilizations found across the planet.
“One of HIS signs is the creation of the heavens and the earth, and the diversity of your languages and colors. Surely in this are signs for those of sound knowledge.” (The Quran 30:22)
“Do you not see that ALLAH sends down rain from the sky with which We bring forth fruits of different colors? And in the mountains are streaks of varying shades of white, red, and raven black; just as people, living beings, and cattle are of various colors as well.” (The Quran 35:27-28)
Within this framework, Sub-Saharan Africans, East Asians, Europeans, Indigenous peoples of the Americas, and countless other non-Hebrew populations trace their ancestry to this original Sabean creation. The Hebrew Bible itself preserves references to Sabeans existing beyond the immediate Hebrew world—including a people described as geographically distant (Joel 3:8). Their extraordinary diversity is therefore not understood by The Book of Light as something that developed solely from a single ancestral family after Adam, but as part of a much broader human creation established by the Most High GOD and HIS Helpers from the beginning.
This distinction also helps explain one of The Book of Light’s central propositions concerning the Hebrew Bible and the Arabic Quran. The Hebrew Bible principally chronicles the history and divine interactions of a particular lineage beginning with Adam (Genesis 2:7), whereas the Quran preserves significant portions of the history and divine interactions associated with the broader Sabean populace (The Quran 23:12). The two sacred records therefore approach humanity’s earliest history from different, yet frequently intersecting, perspectives.
Understanding the Sabeans consequently becomes essential to understanding the reconstructed chronology presented in The Book of Light. Within this framework, the mysterious Sabeans of the Hebrew Bible and Sabians of the Quran are not merely an obscure tribe, the inhabitants of a forgotten kingdom, or an enigmatic religious sect. They represent the surviving scriptural designation for the first order of humanity—the population through which the book explains a world existing beyond Adam and Eve, the nations encountered by their descendants, the distinction between Hebrew and non-Hebrew humanity, and why the Hebrew Bible and Arabic Quran can preserve different portions of what The Book of Light identifies as the same interconnected sacred history.
This understanding leads directly to the other half of the story:
If the Sabeans were already inhabiting the Earth, then who exactly were Adam and Eve?
