Bibliotheca Polyglotta

▪ Jeffery1938: »As a technical term for the portion of good allotted man by God this term occurs only in Madinan passages. In Sūra ix, it refers to man’s portion in this world, and in Sūras ii and iii to man’s portion in the life to come, the two latter passages indeed, as Margoliouth, MW, xviii, 78, notes, being practically a quotation from the Talmud (cf. Sanh, 90a, ʔyn lhm ḥlq l-ʕwlm). / It seems clear that it is a technical term of non- Arabic origin, for though the primitive sense of ḫalaqa is ‘to measure’ (cf. Eth [Gz] ḫʷalaqʷa ‘to enumerate’), its normal sense in Qurʔānic usage is ‘to create’, and this Madinan use of ḫalāq in the sense of ‘portion’ follows that of the older religions. Thus Hbr ḥälqâʰ [also ḥᵃluqqâʰ] is a ‘portion’ given by God, cf. Job xx, 29, and Aram ḥwlqʔ means a ‘portion in both worlds’ (cf. Baba Bathra, 122a, and Buxtorf, Lex. 400). Syr ḥelqā means rather ‘lot’ or ‘fate’, i.e. moîra as in ḥelqā d-mōtā = moîra θanátou, though in the ChrPal dialect ḥwlqā means ‘portion’, i.e. méros.¹ / It is noteworthy that the Lexicons, which define it as al-ḥaẓẓ wa’l-naṣīb min al-ḫayr wa’l-ṣalāḥ,² seem to interpret it from the Qurʔān, and the only verse they quote in illustration is from Ḥassān b. Ṯābit, which is certainly under Qurʔānic influence. Horovitz, JPN, 198 ff., thinks that the origin is Jewish, but Phoen ḥlq is also ‘to divide, apportion’ (Harris, Glossary, 102), so that the word may have been used in the Syro-Palestinian area among other groups.«

1. Schulthess, Lex, 65, and cf. Palestinian Lectionary of the Gospels, p. 126. 2. LA, xi, 380.

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