AND THE JEWS say, "Ezra is God's son," while the Christians say, "The Christ is God's son." Such are the sayings which they utter with their mouths, following in spirit assertions made in earlier times by people who denied the truth!
44 [They deserve the imprecation:] "May God destroy them!"
45 How perverted are their minds!
46
Asad Translation Note Number :
This statement is connected with the preceding verse,
which speaks of the erring followers of earlier
revelation. The charge of shirk ("the ascribing of
divinity [or "divine qualities"] to aught beside God") is
levelled against both the Jews and the Christians in
amplification, as it were, of the statement that they "do
not follow the religion of truth [which God has enjoined
upon them]". As regards the belief attributed to the Jews
that Ezra (or, in the Arabicized form of this name
'Uzayr) was "God's son", it is to be noted that almost
all classical commentators of the Qur'an agree in that
only the Jews of Arabia, and not all Jews, have been thus
accused. (According to a Tradition on the authority of
Ibn 'Abbas - quoted by Tabari in his commentary on this
verse - some of the Jews of Medina once said to Muhammad,
"How could we follow thee when thou hast forsaken our
qiblah and dost not consider Ezra a son of God?") On the
other hand, Ezra occupies a unique position in the esteem
of all Jews, and has always been praised by them in the
most extravagant terms. It was he who restored and
codified the Torah after it had been lost during the
Babylonian Exile, and "edited" it in more or less the
form which it has today, and thus "he promoted the
establishment of an exclusive, legalistic type of
religion that became dominant in later Judaism"
(Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1963, vol. IX, p. 15). Ever
since then he has been venerated to such a degree that
his verdicts on the Law of Moses have come to be regarded
by the Talmudists as being practically equivalent to the
Law itself: which, in Qur'anic ideology, amounts to the
unforgivable sin of shirk, inasmuch as it implies the
elevation of a human being to the status of a
quasi-divine law-giver and the blasphemous attribution to
him - albeit metaphorically - of the quality of "sonship"
in relation to God. Cf. in this connection Exodus iv,
22-23 ("Israel is My son") or Jeremiah xxxi, 9 ("I am a
father to Israel"): expressions to which, because of
their idolatrous implications, the Qur'an takes strong
exception.
My interpolation, between brackets, of the words "they deserve the imprecation" is based on Zamakhshari's and Razi's convincing interpretation of this phrase. Originally, the Arabs used the expression "may God destroy him" in the sense of a direct imprecation; but already in pre-Qur'anic Arabic it had assumed the character of an idiomatic device meant to circumscribe anything that is extremely strange or horrifying: and, according to many philologists, "this, rather than its literal meaning, is the purport [of this phrase] here" (Manar X, 399).
See surah {5}, note [90].
