Muhammad Asad, The Message of the Qur’ān; Translated and Explained by Muhammad Asad (1980)
‘Remove Thou from us the burden of our sins’,43 [whereupon] We shall forgive you your sins, and shall amply reward the doers of good.”
(59) But those who were bent on evildoing substituted another saying for that which had been given them:44 and so We sent down upon those evildoers a plague from heaven in requital for all their iniquity.
(60) And [remember] when Moses prayed for water for his people and We replied, ‘‘Strike the rock with thy staff!” – whereupon twelve springs gushed forth from it, so that all the people knew whence to drink.45 [And Moses said:] “Eat and drink the sustenance provided by God, and do not act wickedly on earth by spreading corruption.”
(61) And [remember] when you said: “O Moses, indeed we cannot endure but one kind of food; pray, then, to thy Sustainer that He bring forth for us aught of what grows from the earth – of its herbs, its cucumbers, its garlic, its lentils, its onions.”
Said [Moses]: “Would you take a lesser thing in exchange for what is [so much] better?46 Go back in shame to Egypt, and then you can have what you are asking for!”47
And so, ignominy and humiliation overshadowed them, and they earned the burden of God’s condemnation: all this, because they persisted in denying the truth of God’s messages and in slaying the prophets against all right: all this, because they rebelled [against God], and persisted in transgressing the bounds of what is right.48
43 This interpretation of the word ḥiṭṭah is recorded by most of the lexicographers (cf. Lane II, 592) on the basis of what many Companions of the Prophet said about it (for the relevant quotations, see Ibn Kathīr in his commentary on this verse). Thus, the children of Israel were admonished to take possession of the promised land (“enter the gate”) in a spirit of humility (lit., “prostrating yourselves”), and not to regard it as something that was “due” to them.
44 According to several Traditions (extensively quoted by Ibn Kathīr), they played, with a derisive intent, upon the word ḥiṭṭah, substituting for it something irrelevant or meaningless. Muḥammad ʿAbduh, however, is of the opinion that the “saying” referred to in verse 58 is merely a metaphor for an attitude of mind demanded of them, and that, correspondingly, the "substitution” signifies here a wilful display of arrogance in disregard of God’s command (see Manār I, 324 f.).
45 I.e., according to their tribal divisions.
46 I.e., “Would you exchange your freedom for the paltry comforts which you enjoyed in your Egyptian captivity?” In the course of their wanderings in the desert of Sinai, many Jews looked back with longing to the comparative security of their life in Egypt, as has been explicitly stated in the Bible (Numbers xi), and is, moreover, evident from Moses’ allusion to it in the next sentence of the above Qurʾanic passage.
47 The verb habaṭa means, literally, “he went down a declivity”; it is also used figuratively in the sense of falling from dignity and becoming mean and abject (cf. Lane VIII, 2876). Since the bitter exclamation of Moses cannot be taken literally, both of the above meanings of the verb may be combined in this context and agreeably translated as “go back in shame to Egypt”.
48 This passage obviously refers to a later phase of Jewish history. That the Jews actually did kill
