Bibliotheca Polyglotta

▪ BAH2008: »occurring four times in the Qurʔān and recognised by the philologists as being of foreign origin. Of the four Korahs mentioned in the Bible, the name and story of Qārūn correspond to the name and story of Korah (son of Izhar, the son of Kobath, the son of Levi) who was leader of the famous rebellion against his cousins, Moses and Aaron, in the wilderness, and who, together with his followers, was burned and swallowed by an earthquake as a punishment from God (Num. 16 and 26:9-11)« | »Qārūn is described in the Qur’an as being so rich that it took a group of strong men just to carry the keys to his treasury. Though people envied him his wealth, he was arrogant and rebelled against God, Moses and Aaron, declaring that he had been given his wealth on account of the knowledge he possessed, and forgetting the many generations before him who were mightier and wealthier than him but were destroyed. In retribution God caused the earth to swallow him and his treasure, thereby proving that wealth is a responsibility and the Hereafter is a reward only for those who do not exalt themselves above others or cause corruption in the earth (28:76-83).«

▪ ec7 (Q 28:76) ʔinna Qārūna kāna min qawmi Mūsà fa-baġà ʕalay-him wa-ʔataynā-hu min-a ’l-kunūzi mā ʔinna mafātiḥa-hū la-tanūʔu bi-’l-ʕuṣbati ʔulī ’l-quwwati ‘Now Korah was of Moses’ folk, but he oppressed them; and We gave him so much treasure that the stores thereof would verily have been a burden for a troop of mighty men’

▪ Jeffery1938: »As Geiger, 155, has shown, the Qurʔānic account of Korah is based on the Rabbinic legends, and we might assume that the word is derived from the Hbr Qōraḥ. The dropping of the final guttural, however, makes this a little difficult. The final guttural, as a matter of fact, is missing in the Grk Koré and Eth [Gz] Qore, but neither of these help us with the Ar form. Hirschfeld, New Researches, 13, n., made the suggestion that Qārūn is due to a misreading of קרח q-r-ḥ as קרון q-r-w-n, a mistake which is very possible in Hbr script. It is fairly certain, however, that Muḥammad’s information came from oral sources, and it is difficult to believe that anyone sufficiently acquainted with Hbr or Aram to be able to read him the story would have made such a blunder. There is a Mnd form K-r-w-n¹ (Lidzbarski, Ginza, Göttingen, 1925: 157), but there can be no certainty that this is connected with Qārūn, and if it is it was probably influenced by the Qurʔānic form. Thus it seems best to look on it as a rhyming formation to parallel Hārūn (Sycz, Eigennamen, 43; Horovitz, KU, 131; JPN, 163), though whether from the Hbr Qōraḥ or from a Christian form without the guttural, it is impossible to say.² «

1. Brandt, Mandäische Schriften, 149, suggested the equivalence with Qārūn. 2. The foreign origin of the word was recognized by some of the Muslim authorities, cf. Sībawaih in Siddiqi, 20.

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qāmūs قاموس , pl. qawāmīsᵘ

√QāMūS, QMS, QWMS

1 ocean; 2 dictionary, lexicon – WehrCowan1976

▪ Via the form ʔuqyānūs ‘ocean’ borrowed from Grk Okeanós ‘Okeanos (god of the sea), Atlantic Ocean’, itself of unknown etymology – Rolland2014. – For more details see below, section DISC.
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▪ »The word ḳāmūs/ḳawmas, from the Greek Ωχεανός, appeared in Ar, at the latest at the time of the Prophet, with the meaning of ‘the bottom, the very deepest part of the sea’. Nevertheless, following Ptolemy, the Arab geographers borrowed the Grk word again, in the form Uḳiyānūs, and applied it to ‘the mass of water surrounding the earth’, more particularly the Atlantic Ocean, which was called Uḳiyānūs al-muḥīṭ, then more simply al-Ḳāmūs al-muḥīṭ. As this latter term was employed in a metaphorical sense by al-Fīrūzābādī as the title of his great dictionary, ḳāmūs eventually came to be a common noun denoting a dictionary, though it still carried some sense of ‘fullness, exhaustiveness’, incontrast to muʕdjam [↗muʕǧam], ‘lexicon’. This distinction, however, was neither general nor absolute, so that nowadays muʕdjam tends to be used in the same sense as ḳāmūs. In classical Arabic, the concept of ‘dictionary’ was not covered by any single term, each lexicographical work bearing its own title. A number of these titles included the word lugha [↗luġaẗ], ‘language’, and lexicography was called ʕilm al-lugha ‘the science of language’. Sometimes this was confused with ‘philology’, which today is called fiḳh al-lugha, an expression already employed in the Middle Ages by Ibn Fāris in the title of his celebrated Ṣāḥibī. The neologism muʕdjamiyyāt is now tending to gain currency« – J.A. Haywood, art. »Ḳāmūs«, in EI².
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See also ↗qamasa (↗QMS) and ↗qawmas (↗QWMS).

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