Then the evildoers among them substituted a saying other than that which had been said to them and said instead ‘A grain inside a hair’ and entered the town dragging themselves on their rears; so We sent down upon the evildoers the replacement of the second person of the previous verse with the overt identification in the third person alladhīna zalamū ‘the evildoers’ is intended to emphasise the depravity of their action wrath a punishment of plague from the heaven for their wickedness for deviating from obedience and within a very short period of time just under seventy thousand of them were dead.
