Yusuf · Makki · ayah 48 of 111

Yusuf 12:48

ثُمَّ يَأْتِى مِنۢ بَعْدِ ذَٰلِكَ سَبْعٌ شِدَادٌ يَأْكُلْنَ مَا قَدَّمْتُمْ لَهُنَّ إِلَّا قَلِيلًا مِّمَّا تُحْصِنُونَ

“Then will come after that seven difficult [years] which will consume what you advanced [i.e., saved] for them, except a little from which you will store.”

Saheeh International

Essence

Then seven hard years will eat what you sent ahead for them, all except the little you keep behind walls for sowing again.

A reflection

The famine eats the store, not the people

The picture we carry of a famine is of hunger that devours people. Seven years of it sounds like a sentence of death on a country.

Read what the ayah says the hard years will eat. Not you. What you sent ahead for them.

The commentaries point out that years do not eat. The eating is done by the people living in them. The years are named as eaters in the way a poet calls the day forgetful and the night asleep. One adds that eating here means using up, as one says the long road ate the camel's flesh.

So the hunger will come, and it will be real. But what it consumes is the store. A people who prepared will watch their granaries go down year by year. They themselves will be fed.

That is the quiet hope in a hard ayah. The size of a hardship's damage is not fixed. It depends on what was put aside before it arrived.

A man loses his job in a bad year and does not find another for fourteen months. Month by month, the savings account goes down. His children's lives barely change. They go to the same school, eat the same meals, have no idea how close it came. The lean months ate the store. They did not eat the family.

Yusuf did not promise Egypt that the hard years would be easy. He promised that if they did what he said, the years would eat grain rather than people.

Preparation does not prevent the storm. It changes what the storm gets to take.

The full entry has 5 more reflections, questions to sit with, and "Live it today" - with the words, the roots and the tafsir alongside. Free, no account, works offline.