وَإِنَّ لَكُمْ فِى ٱلْأَنْعَٰمِ لَعِبْرَةً نُّسْقِيكُم مِّمَّا فِى بُطُونِهِۦ مِنۢ بَيْنِ فَرْثٍ وَدَمٍ لَّبَنًا خَالِصًا سَآئِغًا لِّلشَّٰرِبِينَ
Wa inna lakum fi'l-anʿāmi la-ʿibra, nusqīkum mimmā fī buṭūnihī min bayni farthin wa damin labanan khāliṣan sāʾighan li'l-shāribīn
"In the livestock too there is a lesson for you: from what is in their bellies, from between the farth and the blood, We give you pure milk to drink, going down easily for those who drink it."
A note required by the method (Method), to be entered at the outset
This verse is one of the places most often used for claims of scientific miracle. This commentary does not take that road.
The reason is an explicit clause of the method: "No hunting for scientific miracles. No modern knowledge is forced onto a verse."
One. The words of the verse were chosen not as the description of a physiology but as the description of a kitchen. It is shown below: the words are not the laboratory's but those of a man who slaughters an animal and opens its belly.
Two, and more important: if you tie the truth of a text to a current scientific interpretation, then when the interpretation changes you have brought the text down along with it. And the verse's own sentence does not ask for this — what it says is given below, in its own words.
The concrete sense of the root: to cross from one bank to the other. ʿUbūr — a crossing; maʿbar — a ford; ʿibāra — the speech that carries a meaning from one mind to another; taʿbīr (the interpretation of dreams) — to pass from the image to the meaning.
The choice of the word must be recorded, and it shows what the verse is doing: the verse does not say āya (sign), it says ʿibra. What is asked for, then, is a crossing from the visible to the unseen.
I give this as my own reading; its ground is the root itself: the word names not a place to stay but a place to cross. And all the detail of the verse — the farth, the blood, the milk — are the steps of that crossing, not its destination.
فَرْث — root ف-ر-ث: the sense the lexicographers give is the digested fodder in an animal's stomach. The word occurs only here in the Qurʾān.
And the construction must be recorded: min bayni farthin wa dam — "from between the farth and the blood".
I give this as an observation: the verse enumerates three things in succession and gives the middle one a position. The words are what could be seen in the belly of a slaughtered animal — the fodder in the stomach, the blood, and the milk. The description thus stands at the edge of what can be observed.
And there is no claim about a mechanism beyond that in the verse. The verse gives no name of an organ and describes no process. All it says is where the thing that comes out comes from.
The concrete sense of the root: a thing's separating out of a mixture and becoming pure. Khāliṣ — unmixed; ikhlāṣ — the making of religion unmixed. The root was the backbone of al-Zumar and was treated there in detail; I do not repeat it here.
And the work of the word here must be recorded: the verse enumerated two mixed things (the farth and the blood), then names what comes out khāliṣ. The word is thus placed not as a statement of chemistry but as the counterpart of the two words before it.
I give this as my own reading, and its ground is the order of the three words: the farth and the dam are mixed; the laban is unmixed. What the sentence does is to say that a separation takes place in between — not how it takes place.
The word was treated at Fāṭir, 35/12, and I rely on that treatment. What was recorded there was this:
"سَآئِغ — root س-و-غ: to pass easily down the throat. The word describes the drinkability of water by way of ease of swallowing — that is, not a chemical description but a bodily experience."
| Place | What sāʾigh qualifies | Is its opposite present in the verse |
|---|---|---|
| Fāṭir 35/12 | ʿAdhbun furātun sāʾighun sharābuh — sweet water | Yes — milḥun ujāj (salt, bitter) |
| al-Naḥl 16/66 | Labanan khāliṣan sāʾighan li'l-shāribīn | No — no opposite is set |
The difference must be recorded, and I give it as an observation: in Fāṭir the word was part of a comparison; in al-Naḥl it stands alone. And al-Naḥl adds a qualification: li'l-shāribīn — "for those who drink". The ease is described from the drinker's side.
The principle recorded in the Fāṭir section holds here too, and I repeat it: the verse's description is not chemical but bodily. This is linguistic evidence enough not to turn the verse into a text of physiology.