HKB
believe not in the signs of GOD, or that they shall meet him at the resurrection, they shall despair of my mercy, and for them is a painful punishment prepared.
s viz., The guilt of seducing others, which shall be added to the guilt of their own obstinacy without diminishing the guilt of such as shall be seduced by them. t This is true, if the whole life of Noah be reckoned; and accordingly Abulfeda says he was sent to preach in his two hundred and fiftieth year, and that he lived in all nine hundred and fifty: but the text seeming to speak of those years only which he spent in preaching to the wicked antediluvians, the commentators suppose him to have lived much longer. Some say the whole length of his life was a thousand and fifty years; that his mission happened in the fortieth year of his age, and that he lived after the Flood sixty years;1 and others give different numbers; one, in particular, pretending that Noah lived near sixteen hundred years.2 This circumstance, says al Beidâwi, was mentioned to encourage Mohammed, and to assure him that God, who supported Noah so many years against the opposition and plots of the antediluvian infidels, would not fail to defend him against all attempts of the idolatrous Meccans and their partisans. u i.e., The ark. x This seems to be part of Abraham's speech to his people: but some suppose that GOD here speaks, by way of apostrophe, first to the Koreish, and afterwards to Mohammed; and that the parenthesis is continued to these words, And the answer of his people was no other, &c. In which case we should have said, If ye charge Mohammed your apostle with imposture, &c. y The infidels are bid to consider how GOD causeth the fruits of the earth to spring forth, and reneweth them every year, as in the preceding; which is an argument of his power to raise man, whom he created at first, to life again after death, at his own appointed time. z See Psalm cxxxix. 7, &c.
1 Idem, al Zamakh. 2 Caab, apud Yahyam.