The Quran Verses
Surah 53:13–15
And he certainly saw him in another descent. At the Lote Tree of the Utmost Boundary (Sidrat al-Muntahā). Near it is the Garden of Refuge.
The Cosmic Tree: The Surah establishes a physical landmark inside the highest celestial sphere: a literal Lote Tree marking the absolute border checkpoint where human and angelic knowledge stops.
The Historical Source: To a historical-critical scholar, this heavenly botany is a direct structural import from intertestamental Jewish apocalyptic literature. Specifically, the pseudepigraphal Book of 2 Enoch (8:1–3) describes the journey through the heavens: "And those men took me from thence, and led me up on to the third heaven, and placed me there; and I looked down, and saw the produce of that place... and in the midst of the trees that of life, in that place whereon the Lord rests, when he goes up into paradise."
The Verdict: The Sidrat al-Muntaha is an altered, oral-tradition evolution of the Biblical and Enochic "Tree of Life" inside Paradise. The text co-opts regional Jewish mystical folklore current to the 7th-century Near East, treating sectarian literary metaphors as concrete cosmic geography.