▪ Jeffery1938: »Later it [sc.
ʔāyaẗ] comes to mean a verse of the Qurʔān, and then a verse of a book, but it is doubtful whether it ever means anything more than ‘sign’ in the Qurʔān, though as Muḥammad comes to refer to his preaching as a sign, the word tends to the later meaning, as e.g. in iii, 5, etc. It is noteworthy that in spite of the frequency of its occurrence in the Qurʔān it occurs very seldom in the early Meccan passages.
1
/ The struggles of the early Muslim philologers to explain the word are interestingly set forth in
LA, xviii, 66 ff. The word has no root in Ar, and is obviously, as von Kremer noted,
2
a borrowing from Syr or Aram. The Hbr
ʔôt (cf. Phoen
ʔt), from a verb
ʔāwāʰ ‘to sign or mark’, was used quite generally, for signs of the weather (Gen. i: 14; ix: 12), for a military ensign (Numb, ii: 2), for a memorial sign (Josh, iv: 6), and also in a technical religious sense both for the miracles which attest the Divine presence (Ex. viii: 19; Deut. iv: 34; Ps. lxxviii: 43), and for the signs or omens which accompany and testify to the work of the Prophets (1 Sam. x: 7, 9; Ex. iii: 12). / In the Rabbinic writings
ʔôt is similarly used, though it there acquires the meaning of a letter of the alphabet, which meaning, indeed, is the only one the Lexicons know for the Aram
ʔtʔ.
3
/ While it is not impossible that the Arabs may have got the word from the Jews, it is more probable that it came to them from the Syr-speaking Christians.
4
The Syr
ʔātā, while being used precisely as the Hbr
ʔôt, and translating
sēmeîon both in the LXX and N.T., is also used in the sense of
argumentum,
documentum (
PSm, 413), and thus approaches even more closely than
ʔôt the Qurʔānic use of the word. / The word occurs in the old poetry, e.g. in Imruʔ al-Qais, lxv, 1 (Ahlwardt,
Divans, 160), and so was in use before the time of Muḥammad.«
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