“He had little precision in narrating hadith and made frequent errors.” Abū ʿAbd Allāh—that is, Imam Aḥmad—said: “I do not know him.”

Al-Haythamī said in al-Majmaʿ (4/259): “Al-Ṭabarānī narrated it, and its chain contains Abū Bilāl al-Ashʿarī, whom al-Dāraquṭnī deemed weak.” This is what he said, yet Abū Bilāl does not occur in the chain of transmission in al-Awsaṭ. I therefore do not know whether this was omitted from a copy of Zawāʾid al-Muʿjamayn, or whether a copying or printing error occurred in al-Majmaʿ. For immediately after this, it states:

“On the authority of ʿAbd Allāh ibn Masʿūd, who said: The Messenger of Allah—peace and blessings be upon him—said: ‘Marry virgins, for they have sweeter mouths, are more fertile, and are more content with little.’ Al-Ṭabarānī narrated it, and its chain contains Abū Bilāl al-Ashʿarī, whom al-Dāraquṭnī deemed weak.”

This source citation is exactly like that of Jābir’s hadith, and such duplication is unusual. It is therefore possible that the copyist’s or printer’s eye passed from the citation of the first report to this one, so that it was copied or printed twice for both hadiths, while the citation of the first hadith was lost. I was then confirmed in this possibility when I saw that al-Manāwī quoted al-Haythamī as saying: “It contains Baḥr ibn Kunayz—given in the original as Yaḥyā ibn Kathīr, which is a typographical error—al-Saqqāʾ, who is abandoned.”