2/49-50 — Pharaoh and the sea
"We delivered you from Pharaoh's people, who were visiting the worst torment upon you, slaughtering your sons and sparing your women… And We parted the sea and delivered you, and drowned Pharaoh's men before your eyes."
يَسُومُونَكُمْ — root s-w-m: to put a good up for sale, to press something insistently, to keep placing it before someone. The verb states that the torment was not a single event but a state continually pressed upon them. The commercial root of the word also gives a sense that people were being disposed of like goods under negotiation.
The killing of the male children and the sparing of the women is named separately as a form of oppression. This is not a massacre born of rage but a calculated policy: to dry up the capacity for resistance at its source, to reduce a community to a workforce that goes on reproducing but cannot defend itself. That the Qurʾān records this detail is meaningful — the most dangerous form of oppression is not the enraged one but the planned one.
بَلَآءٌ مِّن رَّبِّكُمْ عَظِيمٌ — "a great trial from your Lord". In Turkish the borrowed word belâ has narrowed to calamity alone, and the usual English renderings show the same drift — "trial" and "affliction" both pull towards misfortune. In Arabic the root b-l-w means to test, to try by wearing down, and it covers testing by good as well. The Qurʾān says this outright: "We test you with evil and with good, as a trial" (al-Anbiyāʾ 21/35).
Which of the two the "balāʾ" here points to has been debated: the oppression itself, or the deliverance? Both are defensible and both come out at the same principle — hardship is a test and so is deliverance. Indeed the rest of this section will recount how the second test turned out.