The Holy Quran with Five Volume Commentary (Vol 4) — Page 122
CH. 20 ṬĀHĀ PT. 16 كُلُوا مِنْ طَيِّبَتِ مَا رَزَقْنَكُمْ وَلَا تَطْغَوْا Eat of the good things that. 82 We have provided for you, and "2:58; 7:161. might become used to a free and hard life and thus acquire and develop those qualities which were SO essential for a great future that lay in store for them. But having lived in bondage for a long time they had lost all initiative and had become used to a life of lethargy and lassitude. So when they saw that they would have to live in the wilderness where no amenities of life were to be found and even food was lacking, they were utterly dismayed and fretted and fumed and quarrelled with Moses saying: "Would to God we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the flesh pots, and when we did eat bread to the full; for ye have brought us forth into this wilderness, to kill this whole assembly with hunger" (Exod. 16:3). God heard the murmurings of the Israelites and commanded Moses to tell those ungrateful people: "At even ye shall eat flesh, and in the morning ye shall be filled with bread; and ye shall know that I am the Lord your God" (Exod. 16:12). And how this Divine promise was fulfilled has been described in the Bible as follows: And it came to pass, that at even the quails came up, and covered the camp: and in the morning the dew lay round about the host. And when the dew that lay was gone up, behold, upon the face of the wilderness there lay a small round thing, as small as the hoar frost on the ground. And when the children of Israel saw it, they said one to another, it is manna: for they wist not what it was. And Moses said unto them, This is the bread which the Lord hath given you to eat. (Exod. 16:13-15). This was the food which in answer to the murmurings of the Israelites God, out of His infinite grace and mercy, bestowed upon them in the wilderness of Sinai and which they were given without much effort or labour on their part, and which was found when stark hunger seemed to stare them in the face, and the fact of and condition did, indeed, constitute a its having been found in that place great miracle. It is to this incident that reference has been made in the verse under comment. The manna has also been referred to in a saying of the Holy Prophet, viz. i. e. the truffle is one of the things included in the manna (Bukhārī). In Lane's Lexicon we have the following explanation for manna under the word (turanjabīn): A kind of manna: the manna of the thorny plants called by the Arabs the haj, and hence by European botanists Alhagi; according to Dr. Boyle it is a sweetish juice which exudes from the Alhagi maurorum, crystallizes into small granular masses, and is usually distinguished by the name of Persian manna; a kind of dew that falls mostly in Khurasan and Mawara an- | Nahr and in our country, mostly upon 2036