Muhammad Asad, The Message of the Qur’ān; Translated and Explained by Muhammad Asad (1980)
(75) Can you, then, hope that they will believe in what you are preaching 60 – seeing that a good many of them were wont to listen to the word of God and then, after having understood it, to pervert it knowingly?61 (76) For, when they meet those who have attained to faith, they say, “We believe [as you believe]” – but when they find themselves alone with one another, they say, “Do you inform them of what God has disclosed to you, so that they might use it in argument against you, quoting the words of your Sustainer?62 Will you not, then, use your reason?”
(77) Do they not know, then, that God is aware of all that they would conceal as well as of all that they bring into the open?
(78) And there are among them unlettered people who have no real knowledge of the divine writ,63 [following] only wishful beliefs and depending on nothing but conjecture. (79) Woe, then, unto those who write down, with their own hands, [something which they claim to be] divine writ, and then say, “This is from God,” in order to acquire a trifling gain thereby;64 woe, then, unto them for what their hands have written, and woe unto them for all that they may have gained!
(80) And they say, “The fire will most certainly not touch us for more than a limited number of days.”65 Say [unto them]: “Have you received a promise from God – for God never breaks His promise – or do you attribute to God something which you cannot know?”
(81) Yea! Those who earn evil and by their sinfulness are engulfed – they are destined for the fire, therein to abide; (82) whereas those who attain to faith
60 Here the Muslims are addressed. In the early period of Islam – and especially after their exodus to Medina, where many Jews were then living – the Muslims expected that the Jews, with their monotheistic beliefs, would be the first to rally to the message of the Qur’an: a hope that was disappointed because the Jews regarded their own religion as a kind of national heritage reserved to the children of Israel alone, and did not believe in the necessity – or possibility – of a new revelation.
61 Cf. Jeremiah xxiii, 26 – “Ye have perverted the words of the living God”.
62 Lit., “before [or “in the sight of”] your Sustainer”. Most of the commentators (e.g., Zamakhsharī, Baghawī, Rāzī) agree in that the expression “your Sustainer” stands here for “that which your Sustainer has revealed”, namely, the Biblical prophecy relating to the coming of a prophet “from among the brethren” of the children of Israel, and that, therefore, the above phrase implies an argument on the basis of the Jews’ own scriptures. (See also note 33 above.)
63 In this case, the Old Testament.
64 The reference here is to the scholars responsible for corrupting the text of the Bible and thus misleading their ignorant followers. The “trifling gain” is their feeling of pre-eminence as the alleged “chosen people”.
65 According to popular Jewish belief, even the sinners from among the children of Israel will suffer only very limited punishment in the life to come, and will be quickly reprieved by virtue of their belonging to “the chosen people”: a belief which the Qurʾān rejects.
