al-Qaṣaṣ 28:43-51 — The Book and "you were not there"

Wa mā kunta bi-jānibi'l-gharbiyyi idh qaḍaynā ilā Mūsa'l-amra wa mā kunta mina'sh-shāhidīn

"You were not on the western side when We decreed the command to Moses, nor were you among those who witnessed it."

The same pattern is repeated three times through the section:

Three times, "you were not there". This is a repetition that can be verified from the text.

I record this as an observation: the proof is built upon the source of the knowledge. And the same method had been treated at al-ʿAnkabūt 29/48 (wa mā kunta tatlū min qablihī min kitāb) — there it was the absence of reading and writing that was made the proof. The two sūras build the same proof by two different routes: the one from the absence of schooling, the other from the absence of witnessing.

وَلَٰكِنَّآ أَنشَأْنَا قُرُونًا فَتَطَاوَلَ عَلَيْهِمُ ٱلْعُمُرُ — tatāwala ʿalayhimu'l-ʿumur: a long time passed over them.

I give this as a record: the verse states the distance between plainly. That is, the knowledge cannot have come by an unbroken transmission — and the weight of the proof is born from this.

وَلَقَدْ وَصَّلْنَا لَهُمُ ٱلْقَوْلَ لَعَلَّهُمْ يَتَذَكَّرُونَ (51) — the root و-ص-ل, Form II: to convey without interruption, by joining one thing to another.

The picture in the word is worth recording: the word was conveyed not at one stroke but link joined to link. And it stands in the same field as the concept of taṣrīf (turning a matter about and about in the telling) treated in al-Zukhruf and al-Jāthiya — the one states repetition, the other continuity.