Tafsir Ibn Abbas: Aal-i-Imraan, Ayah 49

And He will make him to be a messenger to the Children of Israel during his tender years or after puberty. Gabriel breathed into the opening of her garment and she became pregnant. What happened to her after this is mentioned later in sūrat Maryam Q. 1921ff. Thus when God sent him to the Children of Israel he said to them ‘I am God’s Messenger to you’ and ‘I have come to you with a sign an indication of my truthfulness from your Lord and it is that I will create a variant reading for the particle introducing the relative clause annī ‘that I’ has innī ‘truly I’ indicating a new independent sentence that I will fashion for you out of clay like the shape of a bird ka-hay’at ‘something like the shape of’ the kāf is the subject of a passive participle then I will breathe into it fīhi the suffixed pronoun -hi refers to the preceding kāf and it will be a bird tayran is also read tā’iran by the leave the will of God. So he created for them a bat being the most perfectly-created of birds and they would watch it flying but when it went out of sight it would fall dead — so that the work of a creature sc. Jesus may be distinguished from the work of the Creator namely God exalted be He and that he might know that perfection belongs to God alone. I will also heal the blind akmah is one that is blind from birth and the leper; these two are singled out for mention because with both afflictions the person is completely helpless. He Jesus was sent in an age of characterised by medicinal science and he cured through supplication fifty thousand in one day on the condition that each person would become a believer; and I bring to life the dead by the leave of God — He repeats this to preclude any false attributions of divinity to him — he brought back to life his friend ‘Āzar the son of an old woman and the daughter of the tithe-collector all of whom lived on and produced offspring and he also brought back to life Shem son of Noah but he died again immediately. I will inform you too of what things you eat and what you treasure up store in your houses and what I have never seen and he would inform people what they had eaten and what they would eat. Surely in that mentioned is a sign for you if you are believers.