Al-Qasas · Makki · ayah 8 of 88

Al-Qasas 28:8

فَٱلْتَقَطَهُۥٓ ءَالُ فِرْعَوْنَ لِيَكُونَ لَهُمْ عَدُوًّا وَحَزَنًا ۗ إِنَّ فِرْعَوْنَ وَهَـٰمَـٰنَ وَجُنُودَهُمَا كَانُوا۟ خَـٰطِـِٔينَ

“And the family of Pharaoh picked him up [out of the river] so that he would become to them an enemy and a [cause of] grief. Indeed, Pharaoh and Hāmān and their soldiers were deliberate sinners.”

Saheeh International

Essence

Pharaoh's household lifts a baby from the river as a lucky find, unaware they have carried home their own enemy and their own grief.

A reflection

Picked up like a lucky find

Fa-ltaqaṭahu āl Firʿawn: and the household of Pharaoh picked him up. The verb is precise. One lexicon defines this root as taking a thing off the ground that you came upon suddenly, without seeking it. Its family is full of chance finds: pebbles picked up, grain gleaned after harvest, flecks of gold in a mine. A luqaṭa is lost property that someone finds. A laqīṭ is a foundling.

The commentators stress the same sense. To pick something up in this way is to find it without looking for it or intending it. The Arabs, one of them adds, even said 'I met him by picking-up' for an unplanned meeting.

So the word gives us the household's view of events. From the palace steps, this was pure luck. A chest drifted by. Their servants fished it out. Inside was a beautiful baby. Nobody had planned it.

From the previous ayah, we know otherwise. A mother had been told in advance to cast him into the river. A promise had been made about his return. What looked like a stray find was a delivery, addressed and expected.

Another commentator adds a gentle detail. They took him up the way one takes up a found thing one values: with care, keeping it safe from being lost. Pharaoh's household became the guardians of the very child they had been hunting.

Picture a woman at a house clearance who buys a box of old books for two pounds. Inside one, folded small, is a letter. It leads her, after months of searching, to the birth mother she never knew. She tells her friends it was the luckiest two pounds she ever spent. Perhaps. Or perhaps that box was always going to reach her.

The ayah invites a second look at our own lucky finds. The job advert you saw by accident. The stranger who turned out to matter. The book that fell open at the right page. To us they are pickings-up. To Allah, none of them was ever lost.

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.