Note [édition originale] : Behind them there shall be a bar;] The original word
barzakh, here translated
bar, primarily signifies
any partition, or
interstice, which divides one thing from another; but is
used by the
Arabs not always in the same, and sometimes in an obscure sense.
They seem generally to express by it what the
Greeks did by the word
Hades;
one while using it for the place of the dead, another while for the time of
their continuance in that state, another while for the state itself. It is
defined by their critics to be the
interval or
space between this world and
the next, or between death and the resurrection; every person who dies being
said to enter into
al barzakh; or, as the
Greek expresses it, Ἡμεῖς δεδώκάμεν σοι τὸν κάνθαρον καὶ εὖξαι πρὸς τὸν κύρίον σου, καὶ σφράξον
2.
One lexicographer
3
tells us that in the
Korân it denotes
the grave: but the
commentators on this passage expound it a
bar, or
invincible obstacle, cutting
off all possibility of return into the world, after death. See chap. 25.
where the word again occurs.
Some interpreters understand the words we have rendered
behind them, to
mean
before them, (it being one of those words, of which there are several in
the
Arabic tongue, that have direct contrary significations) considering
al
Barzakh as a future space, and lying
before, and not
behind them.
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2
V. Pocock. not. in Port. Mosis. p. 248, &c., and the Prelim Disc. §. IV. p. 77.
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3
Ebn Maruf, apud Gol. Lex. Arab. col. 254.