Al-Waqi'ah · Makki · ayah 13 of 96

Al-Waqi'ah 56:13

ثُلَّةٌ مِّنَ ٱلْأَوَّلِينَ

“A [large] company of the former peoples”

Saheeh International

Essence

The first rank is counted, and the word for the count is a flock bunched close, or a hank of wool gathered in the hand.

A reflection

Not "a large number". A gathered handful.

Translations reach for size. A large company. Many. A throng. Each is a reasonable guess, and none of them is what the word pictures.

Thulla is first of all a flock of sheep, and then the wool those sheep carry. A woollen rope is a ḥabl thulla. And a gathered hank of wool, the amount you can take up in one hand, is itself a thulla. From that the word came to mean a company of people.

So the picture is not a crowd filling a square. It is a flock bunched close enough to drive, or a handful of fleece lifted off the bench.

One lexicon finds a second, separate origin for the same letters, and it is worth knowing. To thalla a house is to pull it down. A man whose standing has been wrecked has his ʿarsh thulla. And the earth thrown out of a well is also a thulla.

A grammarian quoted in the commentaries takes the word from a related verb meaning: I cut it off. On that reading a thulla is a portion separated from a whole. The English would be closer to a section than to a multitude.

One commentary does gloss it as a company of unspecified number. So the sources themselves sit between gathering and quantity.

What they share is this: the word tells you something about how the people are held together, not how many there are.

That changes the feel of the sentence. It is not a census of the foremost. It is a hand closing round a particular group and lifting them out. The counting in this surah runs for two ayat and returns at 56:39-40. It is done in the vocabulary of a shepherd and a wool merchant.

Which is exactly how the surah has described the sorting from the start. A likeness becoming visible, and then gathered.

The full entry has 6 more reflections, questions to sit with, and "Live it today" - with the words, the roots and the tafsir alongside. Free, no account, works offline.