The scholarly study of the Qurʾan in its late antique context is now marked by deep ambivalence towards medieval Arabic tafsīr, or Qurʾanic exegesis. Most scholars agree that the earliest dateable examples of the tafsīr corpus postdate the composition of the Qurʾan by a century or more. This has led some to reject the usefulness of tafsīr as a source of evidence for reconstructing the context and meaning of Qurʾanic passages in their original milieu. There is no question that the tafsīr corpus has often imposed a preformed consensus on the interpretation of certain Qurʾanic passages—shaping or even stunting modern scholarly interpretations in its own image. But this does not exhaust the possibilities for how tafsīr can be brought to bear for a historical-critical examination of both the Qurʾan and the early Islamic community. It does so by examining a crux of Qurʾanic exegesis in which the tafsīr corpus actually lacks consensus, namely ayas fifty-eight and fifty-nine of Sūrat al-Baqara, which contain a peculiar pericope about God punishing the Children of Israel because they substituted one word, which God had commanded them to say, with another. The paper will focus on a single tantalizing possibility within the history of its interpretation: that some early Muslims may have glossed the meaning of this mysterious passage with reference to a perfidious pun on the words for "sin" and "grain" that works in Hebrew and Syriac, but not in Arabic. The paper will present a granular analysis of the evidence for this idea, one that leads to some fascinating reflections on the exegetical intimacies of Jews, Christians and Muslims in the first hijri centuries. That analysis will be anchored in a close reading of Muqātil b. Sulaymān’s Tafsīr on the relevant passage, with an eye to the allusions he makes to the Hebrew Bible and how this informs his reading of the Israelites’ sin. Our approach to this passage reconstructs Muqātil’s reading of the passage in the Qurʾan, the circumstances of the Israelites’ sin, the relevant pun, and the theological assumptions associated with that reading. It suggests that this is a plausible (and underexplored) account of the Qurʾanic passage itself. The paper also situates this reading against Muqātil’s habit of drawing from Israʾiliyyat, and situates some of his exegetical moves in their historical context. The paper's conclusion thus proposes an elegant reading of the Qurʾanic passage in its original milieu as a polemical interlinguistic pun. But it cannot prove that reading. It can only reconstruct a milieu in the early genesis of the tafsīr corpus when the exegetical intimacies of Jews, Christians and Muslims made such a reading possible. Which is—in the mind of the presenters at least—just as interesting.