Texts of Islam

The Prophets, Their Lives and Their Stories: David: Mutat...

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This is Islamic exegetical (tafsir) writing that interprets Quranic passages about the divine punishment of Israelites who violated the Sabbath prohibition on fishing — specifically Quran 2:65–66 and 7:163–164. The text synthesizes multiple classical Islamic narrations to reconstruct the full story: a coastal town (identified with Obballah near Basra) whose inhabitants devised a legal loophole — digging fish-traps on Friday so they could harvest fish on Sunday without technically "hunting" on the Sabbath — and were consequently transformed into apes and pigs as divine retribution. The community is divided into three groups: active sinners (~70,000), passive bystanders who neither sinned nor rebuked, and a righteous minority who condemned the sin and physically separated themselves before the punishment fell; the text carefully traces each group's fate. A distinctive theological point comes from Imam al-Sajjad (Ali ibn al-Husain), who uses the story as a comparative argument: if God punished mere Sabbath-breakers so severely, those who killed the Prophet's family deserved even greater punishment, though God deferred it to the afterlife as a multiplied torment. The text also preserves an unusual detail — that after transformation, the apes could still recognize their former acquaintances and weep in acknowledgment — before being swept into the sea by storms three days later.

The Prophets, Their Lives and Their Stories: David: Mutat...

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