Muʿāwiyah, and led him to Saʿd ibn Mālik al-Zuhri. He said to him,

“Abū Isḥāq, do you remember the day the Messenger of Allah, peace and blessings be upon him, told us about the man whom Moses killed from Pharaoh’s household? Was it the Israelite who informed on him, or the Egyptian?”

Saʿd replied, “It was the Egyptian who informed on him, having heard the matter from the Israelite who witnessed the incident and was present there.”

This is the manner in which Imām al-Nasāʾī set forth the report. It was also transmitted by Ibn Jarīr and Ibn Abī Ḥātim in their Tafsīrs through the narration of Yazīd ibn Hārūn. The closer likelihood—Allah knows best—is that the report is mawqūf; to treat it as marfūʿ raises questions. Most of it is drawn from the Israelite traditions. Only a small portion is explicitly raised to the Prophet within the narration, and even that contains points that merit scrutiny and objection. The greater part of it appears to be the speech of Kaʿb al-Aḥbār. I heard our shaykh, the ḥāfiẓ Abū Ḥajjāj al-Mizzī, say as much. Allah knows best.

The Construction of the Tabernacle

The People of the Book relate that Allah commanded Moses, peace be upon him, to build a tabernacle of shittim wood, animal hides, and goat hair, and to adorn it with dyed silk, gold, and silver according to specifications preserved among them. It consisted of ten curtains, each measuring twenty-eight cubits in length and four cubits in width. The structure had four doors and guy-ropes of silk and dyed damask. Inside were panels and plates of gold and silver. In every corner were two doorways, along with additional large entrances and curtains of dyed silk—details too numerous to mention here.

He was also instructed to make an Ark of shittim wood, two and a half cubits long, two cubits wide, and one and a half cubits high. It was to be overlaid with pure gold inside and out, fitted with four rings at its four corners, and topped along its edges by two golden cherubim—representations of winged angels facing one another—crafted by a man named Bezalel.

Moses was further commanded to fashion a table of shittim wood, two cubits long and one and a half cubits wide, ringed with a molding of gold.