▪ Jeffery1938: »The exegetes naturally take it as the verbal noun from
fassara ‘to explain’, form II of
fasara ‘to discover something hidden’. Fraenkel,
Fremdw, 286, however, thinks that in this technical sense
fassara is a borrowing from the Syr
pšr ‘to expound, make clear’, which is very commonly used in early Syr texts in the sense of ‘interpretation of Scripture’. This sense of ‘to solve, interpret’ from the Aram
pīšar, Syr
pᵊšar ‘to dissolve’ seems a peculiar development of meaning in Aram, and Hbr
pēšär is a loan-word from Aram
pišrā, so that Arab
fassara is doubtless of the same origin,
1
and
tafassara and
tafsīr were later formed from this borrowed verb. / Halevy,
JA, viiᵉ sér., vol. x, p. 412, thinks that he finds the word
ʔfsr ‘interpreter’ in the Safaite inscriptions, which, if correct, would point to the pre-Islamic use of the root in this sense in NArabia.«
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