to return to Egypt and to bondage merely so they could satiate themselves with meat, onions, cucumbers, and lentils (1). Yet what Allah has narrated about them is that they preferred all this over the manna and quail (2).

Even with Moses still among them and their enemy facing them, they plunged into fornication until they grew weak and failed to overcome their foes—something widely acknowledged among them—and their worship of idols after the era of Joshua son of Nun is equally famous (3).

Nor should one forget their subterfuge of fishing on the Sabbath, for which they were transformed into despised apes!

They also slew the prophets without right: on a single day they killed seventy prophets at dawn, then opened the marketplace later that day as though they had merely slaughtered a flock of sheep. That, too, is a well-known fact!

They murdered John son of Zechariah, sawing him apart with a saw, persisted in grave sins, and conspired to alter many of the rulings of the Torah.

They even slandered Lot, alleging that he lay with his two daughters and begot children from them, and they maligned Joseph by claiming that he loosened his trousers and sat before the minister’s wife as a midwife before a woman in labor, until the wall split open for him (4) and the hand of Jacob appeared, biting his own fingers, whereupon Joseph sprang up and fled—an episode so repugnant that, had the most lecherous of men witnessed it, they would have recoiled before fulfilling their desire.