وَدَخَلَ مَعَهُ ٱلسِّجْنَ فَتَيَانِ قَالَ أَحَدُهُمَآ إِنِّىٓ أَرَىٰنِىٓ أَعْصِرُ خَمْرًا وَقَالَ ٱلْءَاخَرُ إِنِّىٓ أَرَىٰنِىٓ أَحْمِلُ فَوْقَ رَأْسِى خُبْزًا تَأْكُلُ ٱلطَّيْرُ مِنْهُ نَبِّئْنَا بِتَأْوِيلِهِۦٓ إِنَّا نَرَىٰكَ مِنَ ٱلْمُحْسِنِينَ
"Two young men entered the prison with him. One said: 'I see myself in a dream pressing wine.' The other said: 'I see myself carrying bread on my head, and the birds eating from it. Tell us its interpretation; we see that you are one of those who do good.'"
The inflection of the verb must be recorded: arānī — imperfect (present/general tense), and both the subject and the object of the verb are the same person.
In Arabic it is not normally permissible for the subject and object of a verb to be the same pronoun (one says ḍarabtu nafsī, not ḍarabtunī); but the verbs of the heart (raʾā, ʿalima, ẓanna) fall outside this rule. The lexicographers record this separately.
And the tense's being imperfect is worth noting; I give this as my own reading: the dream is told not in the past ("I saw") but in the present — as though it were still being seen. Joseph's telling in the fourth verse, by contrast, was in the perfect: innī raʾaytu.
| Verse | Verb | Who |
|---|---|---|
| 4 | Raʾaytu … raʾaytuhum | Joseph — perfect, twice |
| 36 | Arānī (twice) | The two young men — imperfect |
| 43 | Innī arā | The king — imperfect |
The root ع-ص-ر: to press, to squeeze the juice out. ʿAṣr — pressing; iʿṣār — a whirlwind (which squeezes the air). The word will come back in the forty-ninth verse of the sūra: wa-fīhi yaʿṣirūn.
And the lexicographers record that the word khamr is used here in the sense of "grapes" — in Arabic it is common to name a thing by the state it will reach (this is called tasmiya bi-mā yaʾūlu ilayh). This is the same logic as the sūra's key construction: taʾwīl too means "the place a thing arrives at".
I record this as an observation about the language: the word does the same work as the logic of the dream itself — what is seen is named by the name of the state it will reach.
إِنَّا نَرَىٰكَ مِنَ ٱلْمُحْسِنِين — the ground of the request rests on an observation: "we see that you are one of those who do good". And the same pattern (narāka mina'l-muḥsinīn) will be repeated word for word in verse 78, in the mouths of the brothers. This is a repetition verifiable within the sūra.