▪ Jeffery1938: »In 25:53 and 55:20, it is the barrier between the two seas (
baḥrayn) where the reference is probably to some cosmological myth. In 23:100, it is used in an eschatological passage, and the exegetes do not know what the reference is, though as a glance at al-Ṭabarī’s Commentary will show, they were fertile in guesses. / That the word is not Ar seems clear from the Lexicons, which venture no suggestions as to its verbal root, are unable to quote any examples of the use of the word from the old poetry, and obviously seek to interpret it from the material of the Qurʔān itself. / Addai Sher, 19, sought to explain it from the Pers
parzak ‘weeping, crying’, but this has little in its favour, and in any case suits only 23:100. Vollers,
ZDMG, 1:646, makes the much more plausible suggestion that
barzaḫ is a by-form of
farsaḫ ‘parasang’, from the Phlv
frasang, modPers
farsang, which preserves its form fairly well in Grk
parasángēs, but becomes Aram
prsā or
prsh, Syr
parsaḥā whence the Ar
farsaḫ. The Phlv
frasangan of
PPGl, 116, means a ‘measure of land and of roads’
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and could thus fit the sense ‘barrier’ in all three passages.«
▪ Cheung2017(rev): »The connection with the traditional Iranian unit of distance, the
parasang (Pers
farsaḫ, mPers
frasang, etc.), is semantically not quite fitting, as it does not explain how this mundane measurement could have acquired these eschatological overtones. / Actually, the Ar form
barzaḫ looks like a Parth compound *
bwrz-ʔḫw /burzaḫw/ ‘the High, Exalted World, Existence’, mirroring the opposite term
dwj-ʔḫw ‘hell’ (with pref.
dōž- ‘dys-’). The concept
ʔḫw originally refers to an existence beyond this world without being qualified as “bad” or “good”. Unfortunately, *
bwrz-ʔḫw has not yet been found in our limited Parth corpus of texts and inscriptions, although
bwrz and
ʔḫw are attested, separately, in mPers and Parth. Of course,
ʔḫw does occur in compounded formations, e.g. Manich mPers
rwšnʔḫw ‘world of light’ and Parth
dwj-ʔḫw ‘hell’ (also borrowed into nPers
duzāḫ). The form burz is also found in Manich mPers, and is considered a Parth loanword with the figurative meaning of ‘exalted, lofty’. The denominative verb
burzīdan ‘to praise, honour’ is also derived from
burz. Incidently, Ar
barz2
with the meaning ‘intelligent, respectable; dignified’ points to borrowing from Parth
bwrz ‘high, lofty’, possibly via Pers. / Alternatively, especially in view of Sūrah 55:20,
barzaḫ could also reflect a Parth rendering *
bwrzʔḫ(w) /burzāḫw/ of Avestan
barəzāhu (loc.pl.) ‘in the heights’, which is attested in the famous Yasht dedicated to the deity Mithra. In the following passage, Yasht 10.45, the abode of Mithra, the deity that upholds the contract, “is set in the material world as far as the earth extends, unrestricted in size, shining, reaching widely abroad, for whom on every height, in every watchpost, eight servants sit as watchers of the contract”. This abode is a place, “where is no night or darkness, no wind cold or hot, no deadly illness, no defilement produced by evil gods” (transl. Gershevitch 1967: 95 ff., 99). Considering the fact that, in the Qurʔān, the meanings of
barzaḫ allude to some sort of ‘(a means of) separation of two seas’ and also to an existential matter, Ar
barzaḫ may well reflect two, conflated, (near-)homonymous Parth formations, *
bwrzʔḫ(w) ‘an unsurmountable passage, height’ and ‘the Existence beyond,
Jenseits’, respectively. / There is one phonological difficulty remaining, the apparent mismatch of the vocalism of Ar
barzaḫ and its Parth source *
burzāḫw, together with Ar
barz ~ Parth
burz. Ar
-a- in the first syllable of
barzaḫ may reflect the older sub-phonemic pronunciation
-ǝ- (prior to its later labial “colouring”), i.e. Parth [bǝrzāḫw] and [bǝrz] respectively.
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