The Futūḥ literature is replete with examples of Biblical models, narratives, and motifs, suggesting that early story-tellers, tradents, and historians drew heavily upon that rich resource in their efforts to describe the miraculous military successes of the Seventh Century. By reading between the lines, I contend that these texts reveal how early Muslims understood not just their past, but their rôle in broader human history. Muslim historians adopted and adapted Biblical patterns to recast the battles of the Futūḥ as both re-enactments of Biblical episodes and fulfilments of Biblical prophecies. The Israelite conquests provided a thematic and kerygmatic narrative precedent—particularly, the Battle of Jericho, which appears as the foil for a number of Muslim victories. A particularly salient analogy occurs in the conquest of Ḥimṣ—whose city walls collapsed following the Muslim army’s pronouncement of the takbīr. Parallels can be drawn between other Biblical battles and Muslim victories, such as the Israelite ruse during the successful conquest of Ai, which augurs that of the Muslims at Jalūlā. Such intertextuality suggests that Muslim writers engaged in a dialogue with earlier texts and their language provides a key to understanding how these parallels were intended to be read. Speeches by caliphs, generals, and envoys emphasising the divinely-ordained nature of the mission often directly echo the words of God to the Children of Israel on the eve of their conquest of Canaan. Thus, much as Qurʾān imagines the ummah as a ‘new and improved’ salvific community, the Futūḥ narratives recast the Arab-Muslim warriors as entering a Seventh-Century Promised Land. However, for historians removed from the heroïc age by a few centuries, the subsequent course of Islamic history—punctured by assassinations, civil wars, and impious rulers—represented yet another tragic cycle of human history. Their presentation of the Arab-Islamic conquests thus used Biblical paradigms to foreshadow the coming fall from glory. The accounts of the conquests became markers, signalling the departure from the idealised shell of early Islam into the profane world, the peaking of the ‘Golden Age’ of the early Islamic community, whose rending would commence shortly with the first Fitnah, and the continuity of Islamic history and the Muslim community with the prior cycles of Jewish and Christian history, with the hope that redemption might come again.