The Quran

138

Preface

وَجاوَزنا بِبَني إِسرائيلَ البَحرَ فَأَتَوا عَلىٰ قَومٍ يَعكُفونَ عَلىٰ أَصنامٍ لَهُم ۚ قالوا يا موسَى اجعَل لَنا إِلٰهًا كَما لَهُم آلِهَةٌ ۚ قالَ إِنَّكُم قَومٌ تَجهَلونَ

Yusuf Ali

We took the Children of Israel (with safety) across the sea. They came upon a people devoted entirely to some idols¹ they had. They said: “O Moses! fashion for us a god like unto the gods they have.” He said: “Surely ye are a people without knowledge.

Who were these people? We are now in the Sinai Peninsula. Two conjectures are possible: (1) The Amalekites of the Sinai Peninsula were at perpetual war with the Israelites. They were probably an idolatrous nation, but we have very little knowledge of their cult; (2) From Egyptian history we know that Egypt had worked from very ancient times some copper mines in Sinai. An Egyptian settlement may have been here. Like all mining camps it contained from the beginning the dregs of the population. When the mines ceased to be worked, the settlement, or what remained of it, must have degenerated further. Cut off from civilisation, its cult must have become still narrower, without the refining influences which a progressive nation applies even to its idolatry. Perhaps Apis, the sacred bull of Memphis, lost all its allegorical meaning for them, and only gross and superstitious rites remained among them. The text speaks of “some idols they had,” implying that they had merely a detached fragment of a completer religion. This was a snare in the path of the Israelites, whom many generations of slavery in Egypt had debased into ignorance and superstition.