The Holy Quran with Five Volume Commentary (Vol 1) — Page 138
CH. 2 AL-BAQARAH PT. 1 وَإِذْ أَتَيْنَا مُوسَى الْكِتَب وَالْفُرْقَانَ And remember the time. 54 لَعَلَّكُمْ تَهْتَدُونَ when "We gave Moses the Book and the Discrimination, that you might be rightly guided. 60 "2:88; 23:50; 32:24; 37:118; 40:54. 21:49. It may also be noted here that the word used in this verse does not only signify "forgiving or passing over a sin" but also "obliterating a sin". If a man truly and sincerely turns to God with repentance, He not only forgives him his sin but obliterates the very traces of it, leaving him as stainless and pure as a newborn child. The words, that you may be grateful, point to a very deep truth. Forgiveness by a superior authority produces the feelings of gratefulness in the person forgiven, and gratefulness in turn impels a man to further acts of obedience goodness. Thus a sort of continuity in righteousness is brought about. 60. Important Words: and (Moses), the Founder of Judaism, was the deliverer of the Israelites from the hands of Pharaoh. He was an Israelite Prophet who, according to Biblical data, lived about 500 years after Abraham and about 1400 years before Jesus. Moses was a Law-giving Prophet, the other Israelite Prophets that came after him being only followers of his system. As a Law-giving Prophet and the founder of a great religious system, Moses bears striking resemblance to the Holy Prophet of Islam to whom he has been likened in the Quran itself (73:16). As for the name Moses, it may be briefly noted that (Moses) is really a Hebrew word in which language it is written and pronounced as (moshe) and means, "a thing drawn out of water" or simply "a thing drawn out" (Enc. Bib. ). The Bible itself supports that significance where Pharaoh's daughter, speaking of the name Moses, says, "because I drew him out of the water" (Exod. 2:10). This derivation also finds support in Arabic, from which language Hebrew is derived. The Arabs sayi. e. he extricated or drew out the thing (Aqrab). Thus the word which is the passive participle from would mean "a thing extricated" or "a thing drawn out". Another possible derivation is from (derived from (5. ) They say i. e. he cut the thing asunder (Aqrab). As Moses was cut off from his family, he was given that name. Recently, however, the view has been expressed by certain Western scholars, e. g. , by Breasted in his Dawn of Conscience and by Freud in his Moses and Monotheism that Moses is not a Hebrew name but an Egyptian. It is also claimed that Moses was not an Israelite by birth and did not belong to Hebrew stock. There can be no objection if we accept the first-mentioned view regarding the etymology of the name Moses, because as Moses was, in his 138