The third group confused me in a different way.
They say they believe. Then, when they are told to believe as other people believe, they respond by asking whether they should believe like the foolish. I kept coming back to this. Who is telling them? What is being asked of people who have already said they believe? What connection in the language am I missing? Baqarah 2:8, 2:13
The changing audience mattered. Before believers, they declare belief. With their own associates, they declare that they are with them and were only mocking. This is not just a list of beliefs. I am watching people speak to other people, change what they present, and explain themselves differently in different company. Baqarah 2:14
The description of fasad fil ard, corruption in the land, and their claim to be reformers made me wonder about the social scale of this. The first two descriptions had seemed more directly about the people's own orientation. I was thinking about relationships, influence, competing allegiances and claims about what they were doing for the world around them.
Were these people protecting power or status? Trying to fit into different groups? Were they calling the believers foolish because they could not accept what belief might cost them materially? If someone understands success differently, giving something up may be sensible to them and look absurd to someone else.
That was the direction of my thought, not a biography I had extracted from the verses. I wanted to know how much the language would support. Their lying and mockery were there to examine. Their precise motives still needed work. I did not want a personality label in place of that work.
And then there was the question of deceiving oneself.
It came up in the discussion of nafs before I had reached that point in my own reading. I found it immediately interesting. How can someone be deceiving themselves and not know it? Could the study of biases help here? I still wanted the word studied book by book, rather than allowing an interesting connection to stand in for its meaning. Baqarah 2:9
This was also why I wanted more than a broad statement about a gap between words and actions. What is happening when a person claims something in one setting and acts differently in another? What happens to the person's own account of what they are doing? I wanted to examine those questions, not simply leave them under a heading and move on.
Even the ending words were different. For the earlier group, azabun azeem; here, azabun aleem. Great punishment, painful punishment. Here there was also the phrase connecting it with their lying. Why this adjective here rather than the same adjective again? I do not read these changes as random variation. My belief is that the wording is full of wisdom. Knowing two dictionary glosses would only begin the question of why each belongs where it does. Baqarah 2:7, 2:10
This group takes more explaining. There is dialogue, denial, correction, mockery, and then examples. I wondered whether that length was itself connected to the difficulty I was having. These people were not straightforward to understand. Their words turned in different directions.