طه · الآية 33

Commentary

Eight verses have gone by without the speech leaving the asking and what hangs on it: six imperatives, a widening, an easing, an untying, a setting, a tightening, a letting-in, and not one of them said why. Here the particle of purpose arrives.

Its position is its meaning. Had it come at the head of the prayer, every request would have been explained before it was heard, and the listener would have taken each one already knowing where it ends. It comes at the close instead, so that everything before it hangs on it all at once.

And the prayer cannot be read except from here. The second bearer was asked for so that the praising might be much, not so that the load might be light. The width of the chest, the softening of the affair, the loosening of the knot, the tightening of the girth: all of them are instruments of the one purpose, and that purpose is stated in this place and in no earlier one.

Everything before this was singular: my chest, my affair, my tongue, my speech, my household, my brother, my girth, my affair. Eight possessive endings belonging to one speaker. Here the verb carries the nūn of a plural. One asked, and the doer has become two. This is the first place in the prayer where the speaker steps out of his own pronoun, and the sharing asked for in the verse just before has already shown its effect in the grammar: a request that the wording answered before anything outside the wording did. S-b-ḥ is a passing through which nothing of what is passed through clings to the one passing, as a body moves through clear water and comes out carrying nothing; and the doubled form makes the act repeated, a practice rather than an occasion.

Then kathīran, in the accusative, describing an elided verbal noun. It does not say purely, or truly, or always. It says much. K-th-r is an interlocking that thickens and then runs on without breaking off, a number that breeds rather than a heap that is set down. So what is asked for is a helper, and what it is for is a quantity. Whoever asks for a second bearer so that more may be said has not asked for rest. He has asked for room.

The reason comes last, and that is why it governs everything. Read from here, the whole prayer is not a request for a lighter load but a request for a larger output.

Two Readings

The two readings agree that the purpose is worship, and differ over the particle's reach and over which of the two comes first. This book chooses the additional listening.