O Believers! fear God, and speak with well-guided speech.
That God may bless your doings for you, and forgive you your sins. And whoso obeyeth God and His Apostle with great bliss shall be blessed.
Verily, we proposed to the Heavens, and to the Earth, and to the Mountains to receive the Faith, but they refused the burden, and they feared to receive it. Man undertook to bear it, but hath proved unjust, senseless!
Therefore will God punish the hypocritical men and the hypocritical women, and the men and the women who join gods with God; but to the believing men and women will God turn him: for God is Indulgent, Merciful!
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1 Medina was besieged, when this Sura was revealed, by certain confederate tribes at the instigation of the Jews, an. Hej. 5. The first nine verses, however, have no immediate reference to this event, but to Muhammad's cotemporary marriage with Zeinab. See below, verse 37.
2 The Arabians had been accustomed, before the time of Muhammad, to divorce their wives with the words,-thy back be to me as the back of my mother. The drift and motive of this passage is explained by verse 37 below. It had also been the custom to hold adopted sons to be as nearly related to them as their natural ones. See Sura lviii. 2, p. 451.
3 The Mohadjers-those who had emigrated with Muhammad from Mecca. This verse abrogates Sura [xcv.] viii. 73.
4 How they have discharged their prophetic functions.
5 Verses 9-33 have reference to the events of the year Hej. 5, towards the close. See next note. His. 688; Waq. 4 f.