al-Baqara 2:61 — Onions and garlic

"You said, 'Moses, we cannot endure one kind of food. Pray to your Lord to bring forth for us from what the earth grows — its greens, its cucumbers, its garlic, its lentils, its onions.' He said, 'Would you exchange what is lower for what is better?'"

This is the key word in the verse, and it carries both senses at once.

Root d-n-w: to be near and to be low. From the same root comes dunyā — as we saw in the fourth verse, the name of this life is "the near one".

There is thus a second reading of the sentence, and it does not conflict with the first:

"Would you exchange what is nearer for what is better?"

The language itself passes a judgement: the near and the low are named by the same word. What can be held, reached at once, tasted now is for that very reason low in value. The name the Qurʾān chooses for "this world" already carries this assessment within it.

The demand itself is also striking. What is asked for is no luxury — onions, garlic, lentils. Nothing better is being asked for; something more familiar is being asked for. These were the things eaten in Egypt.

The inclination here is the best-known state of a community that has come out of slavery: the uncertainty of freedom is more disturbing than the predictability of bondage. Provision that comes without labour but is unfamiliar is preferred less than food obtained by labour but familiar. A person can prefer an order he knows to be bad to an order he does not know to be good.

The whole pattern of this section is summed up here too: the problem is not, as the word "ingratitude" suggests, a lack of thanks. The problem is the loss of the measure by which what is given would be valued — and when the measure is lost, a person always compares what he has with what he has left behind.