2. Al-Baqara

He said, ‘He says she shall be a cow not broken, not subdued for labour, that is, to plough the earth, churning its soil for sowing (tuthīr al-ard: the clause describes the word dhalūl, and constitutes part of the negation); or to water the tillage, that is, the land prepared for sowing; one safe, from faults and the effects of toil; with no blemish, of a colour other than her own, on her’. They said, ‘Now you have brought the truth’, that is, [now] you have explained it clearly; they thus sought it out and found it with a boy very dutiful towards his mother, and they eventually purchased it for the equivalent of its weight in gold; and so they sacrificed her, even though they very nearly did not, on account of its excessive cost. In a hadīth [it is stated that], ‘Had they sacrificed any cow, it would have sufficed them, but they made it difficult for themselves and so God made it difficult for them’.

And when you killed a living soul, and disputed thereon (iddāra’tum: the tā’ [of the root-form itdāra’tum] has been assimilated with the dāl) — and God disclosed what you were hiding (this is a parenthetical statement; the story begins here [with wa-idh qataltum nafsan, ‘and when you killed a soul’… and continues in the following]):

so We said, ‘Smite him, the slain man, with part of it’, and so when he was struck with its tongue or its tail, he came back to life and said, ‘So-and-so killed me’, and after pointing out two of his cousins, he died; the two [killers] were denied the inheritance and were later killed. God says: even so, is the revival, for, God brings to life the dead, and He shows you His signs, the proofs of His power, so that you might understand, [that you might] reflect and realise that the One capable of reviving a single soul is also capable of reviving a multitude of souls, and then believe.

Then your hearts became hardened, O you Jews, they [your hearts] became stiffened against acceptance of the truth, thereafter, that is, after what is mentioned of the bringing back to life of the slain man and the other signs before this; and they are like stones, in their hardness, or even yet harder, than these; for there are stones from which rivers come gushing, and others split (yashshaqqaq: the initial tā’ [of the root-form yatashaqqaq] has been assimilated with the shīn), so that water issues from them; and others come down, from on high, in fear of God, while your hearts are unmoved, unstirred and not humbled; And God is not heedless of what you do, but instead, He gives you respite until your time comes (ta‘malūna, ‘you do’: a variant reading has ya‘malūna, ‘they do’, indicating a shift to the third person address).

Are you then so eager, O believers, that they, the Jews, should believe you, seeing there is a party of them, a group of their rabbis, that heard God’s word, in the Torah, and then tampered with it, changing it, and that, after they had comprehended it, [after] they had understood it, knowingly?, [knowing full well] that they were indulging in mendacity (the hamza [at the beginning of the verb a-fa-tatma‘ūn] is [an interrogative] for rejection, in other words, ‘Do not be so eager, for they have disbelieved before’).

And when they, the hypocrites from among the Jews, meet those who believe, they say, ‘We believe’, that Muhammad (s) is a prophet and that he is the one of whom we have been given good tidings in our Book; but when they go in private one to another, they, their leaders the ones not involved in the hypocrisy, say, to those hypocrites: ‘Do you speak to them, the believers, of what God has disclosed to you, that is, what He has made known to you of Muhammad’s (s) description in the Torah, so that they may thereby dispute (the lām of li-yuhājjūkum, ‘that they may dispute with you’, is the lām of ‘becoming’) with you before your Lord?, in the Hereafter and hold the proof against you for not following him [Muhammad (s)], despite your knowledge of his sincerity? Have you no understanding?’ of the fact that they will contend with you if you speak to them in this way? So beware.

God says: Know they not (the interrogative is affirmative, the inserted wāw [of a-wa-lā] is to indicate the supplement) that God knows what they keep secret and what they proclaim?, that is, what they hide and what they reveal in this matter and all other matters, so that they may desist from these things.

And there are some of them, the Jews, that are illiterate, unlettered, not knowing the Scripture, the Torah, but only desires, lies which were handed down to them by their leaders and which they relied upon; and, in their rejection of the prophethood of the Prophet and fabrications of other matters, they have, mere conjectures, and no firm knowledge.

So woe, a severe chastisement, to those who write the Scripture with their hands, that is, fabricating it themselves, then say, ‘This is from God’ that they may sell it for a small price, of this world: these are the Jews, the ones that altered the description of the Prophet in the Torah, as well as the ‘stoning’ verse, and other details, and rewrote them in a way different from that in which they were revealed. So woe to them for what their hands have written, of fabrications, and woe to them for their earnings, by way of bribery (rishan, plural of rishwa).

And they say, when the Prophet promised them the Fire, ‘the Fire shall not touch us, that is, afflict us, save a number of days’, only a short time of forty days: the same length of time their forefathers worshipped the calf, after which time it [the Fire] will cease. Say, to them Muhammad (s): ‘Have you taken with God a covenant?, a pledge from Him to this? God will not fail in His covenant, in this matter, or — nay — say you against God what you do not know? (a’ttakhadhtum: the conjunctive hamza has been omitted on account of the interrogative hamza sufficing).