The Quran

وَإِذ قُلتُم يا موسىٰ لَن نَصبِرَ عَلىٰ طَعامٍ واحِدٍ فَادعُ لَنا رَبَّكَ يُخرِج لَنا مِمّا تُنبِتُ الأَرضُ مِن بَقلِها وَقِثّائِها وَفومِها وَعَدَسِها وَبَصَلِها ۖ قالَ أَتَستَبدِلونَ الَّذي هُوَ أَدنىٰ بِالَّذي هُوَ خَيرٌ ۚ اهبِطوا مِصرًا فَإِنَّ لَكُم ما سَأَلتُم ۗ وَضُرِبَت عَلَيهِمُ الذِّلَّةُ وَالمَسكَنَةُ وَباءوا بِغَضَبٍ مِنَ اللَّهِ ۗ ذٰلِكَ بِأَنَّهُم كانوا يَكفُرونَ بِآياتِ اللَّهِ وَيَقتُلونَ النَّبِيّينَ بِغَيرِ الحَقِّ ۗ ذٰلِكَ بِما عَصَوا وَكانوا يَعتَدونَ

Muhammad Asad

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?¹ Go back in shame to Egypt, and then you can have what you are asking for!"² 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.³

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 Qur'anic passage.
The verb habata 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".
This passage obviously refers to a later phase of Jewish history. That the Jews actually did kill some of their prophets is evidenced, for instance, in the story of John the Baptist, as well as in the more general accusation uttered, according to the Gospel, by Jesus: "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them which are sent unto thee" (Matthew xxiii, 37). See also Matthew xxiii, 34-35, Luke xi, 51 - both of which, refer to the murder of Zachariah - and I Thessalonians ii, 15. The implication of continuity in, or persistent repetition of, their wrongdoing transpires from the use of the auxiliary verb kanu in this context.