Surah 20. Ta-Ha, Ayah 51

Sc., "who used to worship a plurality of deities: are they, in thy view, irretrievably doomed?"

But Pharaoh was not the man to accept teaching from the despised Israelite-one, too, who in his eyes was a renegade from the higher Egyptian civilisation. "If," he says in effect, "there is only one God, to Whom all things are referred, this is a new religion. What of the religion of our ancestors? Were they wrong in worshipping the Egyptian gods? And if they were wrong, are they in misery now? He wanted to trap Moses into a scathing denunciation of his ancestors, which would at once have deprived him of the sympathy or the hearing of the Egyptian crowd.