Exegesis of the saying of Allah the Exalted: << And when Moses said to his people, "O my people, you have wronged yourselves by taking the calf as a god. So repent to your Creator, and He will forgive you. Indeed, He is the One who forgives and shows mercy.

Allah, Blessed and Exalted is He, said: meaning, remember, or remember, O Children of Israel, . His saying: The original meaning of injustice is deficiency, and from this is His saying: meaning, it did not diminish anything from it. And it is used for transgression and negligence; transgression in encroaching upon prohibitions and negligence in obligatory duties. Here He says: meaning, by taking the calf as a god. For this reason, we say that is the first object and the second object is omitted; the intended meaning is: by taking the calf as a god. It has been mentioned previously that this calf was a statue of gold that they took from the family of Pharaoh, and then they made it a statue in the form of a calf that had a lowing sound. The exegetes said that this lowing was only by means of the wind; they made its rear open, and the wind would twist in this cavity and then come out of the mouth, so it would have a sound like the lowing of a bull. They said to one another that Moses, peace be upon him, had gone to his god to seek it, and that he had delayed in searching for it because he had gone on the understanding that he would be absent for thirty days, but Allah, Mighty and Majestic, added ten days to it, so the term of his Lord was completed as forty nights. And this is wisdom from Allah, Mighty and Majestic, and a trial and a test. They said that Moses had gone to seek his god, and this is his god. They were saying, "This is your god and the god of Moses, so forget [him]." Allah the Exalted said: They took the calf, wronging themselves thereby, because the soul is a trust with you, and it is obligatory for you to care for it with its due care. For this reason, Allah the Exalted said: So He made us trustees over our souls and forbade us to kill the soul. And He said: So He forbade us to wrong ourselves, which indicates that our souls are a trust with Him and that it is not permissible to be negligent with this trust. For this reason, He said: And in a reading: Repent, meaning, return to your Creator. So they repented. But how was their repentance? He said: Kill yourselves. This was the path of their repentance. They said that Allah cast a darkness over them, and they were gathered in a place, and each one of them was given a dagger, and it was said to him, "Kill the one in front of you," so they killed themselves. The meaning is not that He called them to suicide, that each one should kill himself; no, each one kills his brother. And you know that one tribe is considered one soul. So they did it. Moses, peace be upon him, said: The reference is to repentance in this manner. meaning, with your Creator, who is Allah, Mighty and Majestic. meaning, when you repented, He forgave you, even though their sin was great. But Allah the Exalted forgives whoever repents. meaning, He removed the sin and the punishment from you. The clause here is the reason for the ruling preceding it, which is His saying: Al-Tawwab is the plural of tawwab (one who forgives repeatedly). Al-Tawwab is the plural of tawwab. And the forgiveness of Allah for the servant is divided into two categories:
The first category is His enabling him to repent, and the second category is His accepting the repentance. As for the first, which is His enabling him to repent, it is His saying, Blessed and Exalted is He: meaning, He guided them to repentance so that they would repent. As for the second, which is the acceptance of repentance, in it is His saying: So the forgiveness of Allah, Glorified and Exalted is He, is of two types, as you have heard. meaning, the Possessor of Mercy. And the mercy of Allah, Glorified and Exalted is He, is vast and includes the believer and the disbeliever. And this is the general mercy. As for the special mercy, it is for the believers, as He said: And Ar-Rahim came in this form, and in the form of Ar-Rahman, which indicates vastness and greatness, and in the form of the verb, as He said: .