52 Preface ثُمَّ عَفَونا عَنكُم مِن بَعدِ ذٰلِكَ لَعَلَّكُم تَشكُرونَYusuf AliEven then We did forgive you1; there was a chance for you to be grateful.Moses prayed for his people, and God forgave them. This is the language of the Qur-ān. The Old Testament version is rougher: “The Lord repented of the evil which He thought to do unto His people”: Exod. 32:14. The Muslim position has always been that the Jewish (and Christian) scriptures as they stand cannot be traced direct to Moses or Jesus, but are later compilations. Modern scholarship and Higher Criticism has left no doubt on the subject. But the stories in these traditional books may be used in an appeal to those who use them: only they should be spiritualized, as they are here, and especially in 2:54 below.