Part 103

He said: "Begone then hence: thou art accursed,23

And lo! my ban shall be on thee till the day of the reckoning."

He said: "O my Lord! respite me till the day of Resurrection."

He said, "One then of the respited shalt thou be,

Till the day of the time appointed."

He said: "I swear by thy might then that all of them will I seduce,

Save thy sincere servants among them."

He said: "It is truth, and the truth I speak. From thee will I surely fill Hell, and with such of them as shall follow thee, one and all.

Say: I ask no wage of you for this, nor am I one who intermeddleth.

Of a truth the Koran is no other than a warning to all creatures.

And after a time shall ye surely know its message.

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1 The letter S. See Sura lxviii. p. 32.

2 These verses are said to have been revealed when, upon the conversion of Omar, the Koreisch went in a body to Abu Talib and requested him to withdraw his protection from Muhammad, but being put to silence by the latter, departed in great confusion. Wah. Beidh.

3 That is, in the Christian religion, which teaches, Muhammad ironically implies, a plurality of Gods.

4 This may allude to the so-called "confederacy" of the Koreisch against Muhammad.

5 This term is also applied to Pharaoh, Sura lxxxix. 9, p. 54. He is said to have fastened the Israelites to stakes, and then subjected them to various torments.

addenda: This is the usual interpretation. Lit. Lord of, or, possessor of stakes (comp. li. 39 in Ar.), i.e., Forces. Dr. Sprenger ingenuously suggests that Muhammad’s Jewish informant may have described Pharaoh as rich in neçyb, i.e., fortresses; whereas, in Ar., naçyb, means an erection, pillar, etc., for which Muhammad substituted the word for tent stakes. Vol. i. (470).

6 Præditi (manibus) virtute. Mar.

7 Comp. Ps. cxlviii. 9, 10.

8 Two angels who pretended to appeal to David in order to convince him of his sin in the matter of Uriah's wife. Comp. I Sam. xii.

9 The Psalms, if we suppose with Nöldeke, p. 99, that David is still addressed: the Koran, if with Sale we refer the passage to Muhammad.

10 The Commentators say that the word used in the original implies that the mares stood on three feet, and touched the ground with the edge of the fourth foot.

11 Solomon, in his admiration of these horses, the result, we are told, of David's or his own conquests, forgot the hour of evening prayer, and when aware of his fault commenced their slaughter. The Tr. Sanhedr. fol. 21, mentions Solomon's love for horses, and that he determined to have a large stud; yet not to send the people to Egypt (Deut. xvii. 16) but to have them brought to him out of Egypt (I Kings x. 28).

12 One of the Djinn. The absurd fiction may be seen in extenso in Sale. Compare Tr. Sanhedr. fol. 20, b. and Midr. Jalkut on I Kings vi. § 182.

13 Thus the second Targum on Esther i. 2, mentions the four different kinds of Demons which were "given into the hand" of Solomon-a legend derived from a misunderstanding of Eccl. ii. 8.

14 The fountain which had sprung up. To this history the Talmudists have no allusion.

15 Thy wife;-on whom he had sworn that he would inflict an hundred blows, because she had absented herself from him when in need of her assistance, or for her words (Job ii. 9). The oath was kept, we are told, by his giving her one blow with a rod of a hundred stalks. This passage is often quoted by the Muslims as authorising any similar manner of release from an oath inconsiderately taken.