Ṭāhā 20:77-79

Wa laqad awḥaynā ilā Mūsā an asri bi-ʿibādī faḍrib lahum ṭarīqan fi'l-baḥri yabasan lā takhāfu darakan wa lā takhshā · Fa-atbaʿahum Firʿawnu bi-junūdihi fa-ghashiyahum mina'l-yammi mā ghashiyahum · Wa aḍalla Firʿawnu qawmahu wa mā hadā

"Indeed We revealed to Moses: 'Travel by night with My servants and strike out for them a dry road through the sea. Do not fear being overtaken, and do not be afraid.' · Pharaoh followed them with his armies, and there covered them from the sea what covered them. · Pharaoh led his people astray and did not guide."

This is one of the most striking decisions of narration in the Qurʾān, and a point of word order must be recorded.

The sentence does not name the thing that covered them: ghashiyahum … mā ghashiyahum — "there covered them what covered them."

In Arabic this pattern is called ibhām li't-tafkhīm: a thing's being deliberately left indefinite so as to magnify it. The same pattern occurs at al-Najm 53/16 (idh yaghsha's-sidrata mā yaghshā) and was treated at al-Najm. I rely on that treatment.

I record this as my own reading, and its ground is the pattern itself: the scene of the drowning is not told. Neither the height of the water, nor the cries, nor the duration. The verb is repeated and its object left indefinite. And at al-Shuʿarāʾ on 26/66 the same event was given in a single phrase: thumma aghraqna'l-ākharīn. Neither sūra widens the scene.

This confirms from the text itself a principle recorded in Method: one does not enter into a detail the Qurʾān does not give — because the text itself does not enter into it.

The last sentence of the block, and one of the tightest links in the sūra, is here.

In the fiftieth verse Moses's answer was: aʿṭā kulla shayʾin khalqahu thumma hadā. The seventy-ninth verse negates the same verb of Pharaoh: wa mā hadā.

The distance between the two is twenty-nine verses, and the whole encounter has been told in between. I record this as my own reading: the sūra delivers the verdict on the dispute not with a sentence of conclusion but by bringing back the word with which the dispute was opened. The question was "who is your Lord"; the core of the answer was "the one who guides"; the core of the verdict is "he did not guide".

And the verb aḍalla is worth recording: it is not said of Pharaoh himself that "he went astray" — it is said that "he led his people astray". That is, the verdict is built not on his personal fate but on the responsibility he carried. The same line was treated at al-Qaṣaṣ on 28/41 (wa jaʿalnāhum aʾimmatan yadʿūna ila'n-nār), and it was recorded there: "to be in front is a position; what is decisive is where one calls people to." I rely on that treatment.