Tafheem-ul-Quran - Abul Ala Maududi

Ayah by Ayah

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Tafheem-ul-Quran - Abul Ala Maududi translation for Surah As-Saffat — Ayah 125

37:125
أَتَدۡعُونَ بَعۡلٗا وَتَذَرُونَ أَحۡسَنَ ٱلۡخَٰلِقِينَ ١٢٥
Do you call upon Baal1 and forsake the Best of the Creators?
Footnotes
  • [1] Frequently the Qur’an addresses the events of the hereafter in pasttense; this grammatical shift should be pondered by the reader.
  • [2] Lexically, baal means master, chief and possessor. This word was also used for husband, and has been used in this sense at several places in the Quran itself, e.g. in (Surah Al- Baqarah, Ayat 228); (Surah An-Nisa, Ayat 127); (Sura Houd, Ayat 72) and (Surah An-Noor, Ayat 31). However; in the ancient times the Semetic nations used it in the meaning of deity or lord; they had even given the name of Baal to a special god. The chief male god of the Phoenicians, in particular, was Baal and their chief goddess was Ashtoreth, his wife. The scholars differ as to whether Baal meant the sun or Jupiter, and Ashtoreth the moon or Venus. In any case, historically it is certain that Baal worship was prevalent from Babylon to Egypt throughout the Middle East, and the polytheistic communities of the Lebanon and Syria and Palestine, in particular, had become its devotees. When the Israelites settled in Palestine and Jordan after they came out from Egypt, they started contracting marriage and other social relations with the polytheistic nations round about them, in violation of the strict prohibitive injunctions of the Torah, the disease of idolworship began to spread among them, too. According to the Bible, this moral and religious decline had started appearing among the Israelites soon after the death of Joshua, son of Nun, who was the first caliph of the Prophet Moses: