Al-Baqarah · Madani · ayah 69 of 286

Al-Baqarah 2:69

قَالُوا۟ ٱدْعُ لَنَا رَبَّكَ يُبَيِّن لَّنَا مَا لَوْنُهَا ۚ قَالَ إِنَّهُۥ يَقُولُ إِنَّهَا بَقَرَةٌ صَفْرَآءُ فَاقِعٌ لَّوْنُهَا تَسُرُّ ٱلنَّـٰظِرِينَ

“They said, "Call upon your Lord to show us what is her color." He said, "He says, 'It is a yellow cow, bright in color - pleasing to the observers.'"”

Saheeh International

Essence

They asked about the colour, and the answer made the cow rarer: a deep, pure yellow that gladdens the heart of anyone who looks.

A reflection

Yellow, and yellower still

A man at the paint desk of a DIY shop asks for 'yellow'. The assistant opens a fan of sixty yellows. He looks for a long time, then points. 'That one. The one that really means it.'

Arabic had a word for that. The early lexicographers record a matching intensifier for each colour. Black is ḥālik, white is yaqaq, red is qāniʾ, green is nāḍir. And yellow is fāqiʿ. A linguistic commentary defines fuqūʿ as the most intense and purest yellow there is. Another commentary quotes an early grammarian: its colour is fāqiʿ when the yellow is pure, with nothing else mixed in.

The phrasing doubles the emphasis. The ayah could have said 'an intensely yellow cow'. Instead it says, literally, 'yellow, intense is its colour'. The linguistic commentary explains why. Colour is the name of the yellowness itself, so it is like saying 'yellow, its yellowness intensely yellow'.

A minority view held that ṣafrāʾ here meant black, since Arabs sometimes called dark camels 'yellow' (77:33). The commentaries answer it plainly. Fāqiʿ is never said of black, only of yellow, so the plain meaning stands.

The point is not the paint chart. It is that each answer to their questions narrowed the field. First 'a cow'. Then 'neither old nor young'. Now this one shade, and the deepest version of it. They had asked for precision, and precision is what they were given.

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.