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This chapter utilizes hadith texts as a window into the thoughts of its creators, Muslim believers who lived many decades after the prophet's death and whose religious ideas were reflected in the way they chose to describe the divine nature of the Quran. The Quran itself was the major source which shaped the Islamic tradition. Early Muslims stressed the Quran's divine origin and nature and praised its mode of revelation in comparison to that of previous scriptures, but they made a distinction between the heavenly Quran and the actual, “earthly” text possessed by the believers. The distinction between the two versions of the Quran, one in heaven and the other the Uthmanic codex, is made quite clearly in a group of traditions dealing with the history of the Quranic text, which describe the way Quranic revelations were compiled into a complete version of the Quran in the prophet's lifetime.