وَأَرْسَلْنَا ٱلرِّيَٰحَ لَوَٰقِحَ فَأَنزَلْنَا مِنَ ٱلسَّمَآءِ مَآءً فَأَسْقَيْنَٰكُمُوهُ وَمَآ أَنتُمْ لَهُۥ بِخَٰزِنِينَ
Wa arsalnā'l-riyāḥa lawāqiḥa fa-anzalnā mina'l-samāʾi māʾan fa-asqaynākumūh · Wa mā antum lahu bi-khāzinīn
"We sent the winds as fertilisers; We sent down water from the sky and gave it to you to drink. It is not you who store it up."
The ل-ق-ح root. The concrete sense of the root is given by the lexicographers thus: the she-camel's conceiving; and the fertilising of the date palm (talqīḥu'l-nakhl) — the transfer of the pollen of the male palm to the female.
The lexicographers differ over the grammatical status of the word lawāqiḥ, and this determines the sense:
| Reading | What lawāqiḥ is | Sense |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | The plural of lāqiḥa — an active participle | The winds are fertilising |
| 2 | Counted the plural of mulqiḥa (a use outside the pattern) | The winds are the fertilisers |
| 3 | Lāqiḥ means one that is itself pregnant | The winds are laden — laden with water |
A boundary per the method (Method)
This verse is one of the most forced verses of the modern period, and an explicit note must be entered here.
In this commentary no meteorological or botanical information is derived from the verse. No matching will be made with notions such as cloud physics, the formation of rainfall, the carrying of pollen, or condensation nuclei. The same boundary was set at al-Zumar 39/5 and at al-Ṣāffāt 37/6-10; I rely on those treatments.
The reason is this, and I give it as a note of method: the lexical sense of the word is fertilisation, and this sense existed in Arabic before the verse and after it. The one the verse addressed was a society that fertilised date palms, and it understood the word. To tear a word away from the sense its addressee understood and attach it to a piece of knowledge a thousand years later is contrary to the principle the verse itself declares: wa mā arsalnā min rasūlin illā bi-lisāni qawmihi li-yubayyina lahum (Ibrāhīm 14/4). The principle treated there works here as a boundary.
I keep within the classical explanations, and those too were given in the table: the wind is either a fertiliser (of the cloud or of the plant), or it is laden. Deciding which of these two readings is correct is not the business of this commentary.
And the sentence is joined to the preceding verse at the level of vocabulary: ʿindanā khazāʾinuhu (21) → wa mā antum lahu bi-khāzinīn (22).
| Verse | Expression | Who |
|---|---|---|
| 21 | ʿIndanā khazāʾinuhu | The storehouses are with Him |
| 22 | Mā antum lahu bi-khāzinīn | You are not the ones who store |
I record this as my own reading, and its ground is the shared root in the two verses: the sūra first says where the storehouse is, then who is not the storekeeper. The two sentences together say a single thing: the holding of water is not man's work.
And there is a weave with the twentieth verse too: wa man lastum lahu bi-rāziqīn (20) — wa mā antum lahu bi-khāzinīn (22). Two negative sentences very close to one another in two verses, on the same pattern. Both name a work man does not do: one feeding, the other storing. This is a repetition of word order within the sūra that can be verified.