Bibliotheca Polyglotta

▪ Jeffery1938: »In all the passages save xii, 24, and xxviii, 32, it is used in the sense of a proof or demonstration of the truth of one’s religious position.
In these two cases, one from the story of Joseph and the other from that of Moses, the word refers to an evident miraculous sign from God for the demonstration of His presence and power to him who beheld it. It is thus clearly used in the Qurʔān as a technical religious term.¹ . / It is generally taken as a form fuʕlān from √BRH, form IV of which is said to mean ‘to prove’, but the straits to which the philologers are put to explain the word (cf. Rāġib, Mufradāt, 44; LA, xvii, 369), show us that we are dealing with a foreign word. Sprenger, Leben, i, 108 had noted this,² but he makes no attempt to discover its origin. / Addai Sher, 21, suggested that it is from the Pers purūhān ‘clearly manifest, well known’ (cf. Vullers, Lex., i, 352), but this is somewhat remote. The origin clearly is, as Nöldeke has shown (Neue Beiträge, 58)³ , in the Eth [Gz] bərhān, a common Abyssinian word,⁴ being found also in Amh, Te, and Tña, meaning ‘light, illumination’, from a root [Gz] BRH cognate with Hbr BHR, Ar BHR. It seems to have this original sense in iv, 174; xii, 24, and the sense of ‘proof’ or ‘demonstration’ is easily derived from this.«

1. Ahrens, Christliches, 22, makes a distinction between xii, 24; iv, 147; xxiii, 117, where it means ‘Licht, Erleuchtung’, and the other passages where it means ‘Beweis’. 2. Also Massignon, Lexique technique, 52. 3. Also ibid., p. 25. 4. It is in frequent use even in the oldest monuments of the language.

west

deriv

Permanent link

http://www2.hf.uio.no/common/apps/permlink/permlink.php?app=polyglotta&context=record&uid=d7a3f27d-06ff-11ee-937a-005056a97067

Choose languages

Choose images, etc.

Choose languages

Choose display