Baidawi says: 'Because of God's command to them to keep His Book from being lost or perverted.' And Zamakhshari: '(They were) guardians, lest it (the Book) should be changed.' And Jalalu'd-Din: 'Lest they should change it (the Book).' And Tabari: 'They condemned them on the authority of the Book of God which was sent down on His Prophet Moses.' And Razi, the strongest of them all, says that these divine guardians (Rabbis, Priests, Prophets, and Muhammad himself), were ' witnesses that everything in the Taurat was truth and of God' —meaning, of course, the actual Book current among the Jews of that day. 'As though,' continues Razi, 'God were addressing the people saying, "Beware that ye pervert not my book through fear."'

5. This passage fixes the meaning tahrif and tabdil (perversion and substitution) wherever they occur. They clearly mean, not falsification of text, as we have seen, but concealment of it, or lying about its contents, or twisting it with false interpretations. On this point the commentators are unanimous. So Razi:—

'The keeping of God's book is of two kinds; keeping it from being forgotten and keeping it from being lost. Now God put upon the 'Ulama the keeping of the Book in both kinds, namely, (1) that they should keep it in their hearts and learn it with their tongues, and (2) that they should not lose its judgements, nor neglect its laws.'

More remarkable still is the tradition which Razi quotes from ibn 'Abbas, an uncle of Muhammad: 'The Taurat and Injil were books which had reached a degree of celebrity and universal traditional consent (tawatur) which rendered impossible such a thing (as corruption) in their case.'

Impossible! We thank ibn 'Abbas for that word, and we thank God; for, if the corruption of the Bible was impossible before or during Muhammad's day, it has become more and more impossible since that time, owing to the ever-increasing area of the circulation of the Book, and the bitterness between the sects, all of which profess the Taurat and each of which would watch like lynxes for any sign of tampering on the part of another; to say nothing of the total silence of history about so marvellous a conspiracy, of all the Jewish and Christian leaders in the world, to change 'be it remembered' not one text only, but a whole Book! Impossible! we echo again with ibn 'Abbas!

So, then, like a rock stands the truth that the Taurat sold to-day is the very Book pointed to by Muhammad that day in Madina, and expounded to him by ibn Suriya. And let us thank God for the evidence and the witness, and in it is this Verse of Stoning as we shall see in the next chapter.