21أَمِ اتَّخَذوا آلِهَةً مِنَ الأَرضِ هُم يُنشِرونَMuhammad AsadAnd yet,1 some people choose to worship certain earthly things or beings as deities2 that [are supposed to] resurrect [the dead; and they fail to realize that],As stressed by Zamakhshari, the particle am which introduces this sentence has not, as is so often the case, an interrogative sense ("is it that..."), but is used here in the sense of bal, which in this instance may be rendered as "and yet".Lit., "they have taken unto themselves deities from the earth", i.e., from among the things or beings found on earth: an expression which alludes to all manner of false objects of worship - idols of every description, forces of nature, deified human beings, and, finally, abstract concepts such as wealth, power, etc.