وَإِنَّ لَكُمْ فِي الْأَنْعَامِ لَعِبْرَةً ۖ نُّسْقِيكُم مِّمَّا فِي بُطُونِهِ مِن بَيْنِ فَرْثٍ وَدَمٍ لَّبَنًا خَالِصًا سَائِغًا لِّلشَّارِبِينَ
There is indeed a lesson for you in the cattle: We give you a drink pleasant to those who drink, pure milk, which is in their bellies, between [intestinal] waste and blood.
وَمِن ثَمَرَاتِ النَّخِيلِ وَالْأَعْنَابِ تَتَّخِذُونَ مِنْهُ سَكَرًا وَرِزْقًا حَسَنًا ۗ إِنَّ فِي ذَٰلِكَ لَآيَةً لِّقَوْمٍ يَعْقِلُونَ
From the fruits of date palms and vines you draw wine and goodly provision. There are indeed signs in that for people who exercise their reason.
وَأَوْحَىٰ رَبُّكَ إِلَى النَّحْلِ أَنِ اتَّخِذِي مِنَ الْجِبَالِ بُيُوتًا وَمِنَ الشَّجَرِ وَمِمَّا يَعْرِشُونَ
And your Lord inspired the bee [saying]: ‘Make your home in the mountains, and on the trees and the trellises that they erect.
ثُمَّ كُلِي مِن كُلِّ الثَّمَرَاتِ فَاسْلُكِي سُبُلَ رَبِّكِ ذُلُلًا ۚ يَخْرُجُ مِن بُطُونِهَا شَرَابٌ مُّخْتَلِفٌ أَلْوَانُهُ فِيهِ شِفَاءٌ لِّلنَّاسِ ۗ إِنَّ فِي ذَٰلِكَ لَآيَةً لِّقَوْمٍ يَتَفَكَّرُونَ
Then eat from every [kind of] fruit and follow meekly the ways of your Lord.’ There issues from its belly a juice of diverse hues, in which there is a cure for the people. There is indeed a sign in that for a people who reflect.
وَاللَّهُ خَلَقَكُمْ ثُمَّ يَتَوَفَّاكُمْ ۚ وَمِنكُم مَّن يُرَدُّ إِلَىٰ أَرْذَلِ الْعُمُرِ لِكَيْ لَا يَعْلَمَ بَعْدَ عِلْمٍ شَيْئًا ۚ إِنَّ اللَّهَ عَلِيمٌ قَدِيرٌ
Allah has created you, then He takes you away, and there are some among you who are relegated to the nethermost age so that he knows nothing after [having possessed] some knowledge. Indeed Allah is all-knowing, all-powerful.
وَاللَّهُ فَضَّلَ بَعْضَكُمْ عَلَىٰ بَعْضٍ فِي الرِّزْقِ ۚ فَمَا الَّذِينَ فُضِّلُوا بِرَادِّي رِزْقِهِمْ عَلَىٰ مَا مَلَكَتْ أَيْمَانُهُمْ فَهُمْ فِيهِ سَوَاءٌ ۚ أَفَبِنِعْمَةِ اللَّهِ يَجْحَدُونَ
Allah has granted some of you an advantage over others in [respect of] provision. Those who have been granted an advantage do not give over their provision to their slaves so that they become equal in its respect. What, do they deny the blessing of Allah?
وَاللَّهُ جَعَلَ لَكُم مِّنْ أَنفُسِكُمْ أَزْوَاجًا وَجَعَلَ لَكُم مِّنْ أَزْوَاجِكُم بَنِينَ وَحَفَدَةً وَرَزَقَكُم مِّنَ الطَّيِّبَاتِ ۚ أَفَبِالْبَاطِلِ يُؤْمِنُونَ وَبِنِعْمَتِ اللَّهِ هُمْ يَكْفُرُونَ
Allah made for you mates from your own selves and appointed for you children and grandchildren from your mates, and We provided you with all the good things. What, do they believe in falsehood while they deny the blessing of Allah?
وَيَعْبُدُونَ مِن دُونِ اللَّهِ مَا لَا يَمْلِكُ لَهُمْ رِزْقًا مِّنَ السَّمَاوَاتِ وَالْأَرْضِ شَيْئًا وَلَا يَسْتَطِيعُونَ
They worship besides Allah what has no power to provide them with anything from the heavens and the earth, nor are they capable [of anything].
فَلَا تَضْرِبُوا لِلَّهِ الْأَمْثَالَ ۚ إِنَّ اللَّهَ يَعْلَمُ وَأَنتُمْ لَا تَعْلَمُونَ
So do not draw comparisons for Allah: indeed Allah knows and you do not know.
ضَرَبَ اللَّهُ مَثَلًا عَبْدًا مَّمْلُوكًا لَّا يَقْدِرُ عَلَىٰ شَيْءٍ وَمَن رَّزَقْنَاهُ مِنَّا رِزْقًا حَسَنًا فَهُوَ يُنفِقُ مِنْهُ سِرًّا وَجَهْرًا ۖ هَلْ يَسْتَوُونَ ۚ الْحَمْدُ لِلَّهِ ۚ بَلْ أَكْثَرُهُمْ لَا يَعْلَمُونَ
Allah draws a parable: a slave owned [by his master] who has no power over anything, and another one [a free man] whom We have provided a goodly provision and who spends out of it secretly and openly. Are they equal? All praise belongs to Allah. But most of them do not know.
وَضَرَبَ اللَّهُ مَثَلًا رَّجُلَيْنِ أَحَدُهُمَا أَبْكَمُ لَا يَقْدِرُ عَلَىٰ شَيْءٍ وَهُوَ كَلٌّ عَلَىٰ مَوْلَاهُ أَيْنَمَا يُوَجِّههُّ لَا يَأْتِ بِخَيْرٍ ۖ هَلْ يَسْتَوِي هُوَ وَمَن يَأْمُرُ بِالْعَدْلِ ۙ وَهُوَ عَلَىٰ صِرَاطٍ مُّسْتَقِيمٍ
Allah draws [another] parable: Two men, one of whom is dumb, having no power over anything and who is a liability to his master: wherever he directs him he does not bring any good. Is he equal to someone who enjoins justice and is [steady] on a straight path?
English translation: Ali Quli Qarai
Triangulating Ṭabarsī's Majmaʿ al-Bayān [tabarsi_majma_al_bayan], the Tafsīr al-Qummī [qummi], Ṭūsī's al-Tibyān [tusi_al_tibyan], Baḥrānī's al-Burhān [bahrani_al_burhan], and Ṭabāṭabāʾī's al-Mīzān [tabatabai_al_mizan]; the published Enlightening Commentary [enlightening_commentary] runs alongside.
Human-review flags: al-Mīzān [tabatabai_al_mizan] is flagged
needs_human_review— its fetched unit spans vv.65–77 (~37k chars) and was heavily condensed; the long ʿumūm al-qudra excursus and the v.77 lamḥ al-baṣar material lie outside this passage and were omitted (everything interpretive for 66–76 is preserved).
What the passage says. Three signs of divine bounty are marshalled for tawḥīd and resurrection: pure milk drawn "between digested matter and blood" (v.66); palm and vine yielding both an intoxicant (sakar) and goodly provision (v.67); and the bee, divinely inspired to build and forage, from whose belly comes a many-hued drink "with healing for mankind" (vv.68–69). Then the human signs: creation and death, the "most abject age" of senile forgetting (v.70); the disparity of provision and the master/slave relation (v.71); spouses, offspring and good things (v.72); the impotence of false gods (v.73); and two parables — the powerless owned slave vs. the free spender, and the dumb dependant vs. the one who enjoins justice (vv.74–76).
The lexical and grammatical layer. On farth, all the philological sources converge: it is the residue in the rumen (Qummī [qummi]; Ṭūsī [tusi_al_tibyan]; al-Mīzān [tabatabai_al_mizan], which adds that once expelled it is mere dung). Ṭabarsī [tabarsi_majma_al_bayan] preserves the Ibn-ʿAbbās physiology — lower part farth, upper blood, middle milk. On the qirāʾa of nasqīkum/nusqīkum, Ṭabarsī and Ṭūsī agree (Nāfiʿ, Ibn ʿĀmir, Abū Bakr with fatḥa), and both report al-Kisāʾī's/Abū-ʿUbayda's distinction between saqā (one draught) and asqā (perpetual drink).
The sakar crux. Here the sources diverge productively. Ṭabarsī [tabarsi_majma_al_bayan] lists four lexical senses and records the majority reading (Ibn ʿAbbās etc.): sakar = what is forbidden, rizq ḥasan = what is lawful; he notes Qatāda's claim of pre-prohibition revelation but, with Abū Muslim, rejects using the verse to legalize nabīdh. Ṭūsī [tusi_al_tibyan] argues the same three-fold refutation. Qummī [qummi], strikingly, glosses sakar as vinegar (khall) and rizq ḥasan as raisins. Al-Mīzān [tabatabai_al_mizan] is the most theologically pointed: leaning on al-Rāghib's Mufradāt, it holds the verse carries no prescriptive ruling at all, so it is neither abrogated nor abrogating — and the very idiom of "conferring favour" forbids reading sakar as a licensed blessing later branded a defilement.
The bee: literal and esoteric. Ṭabarsī, Ṭūsī and al-Mīzān read the bee literally — waḥy as instinct (ilhām), the king-bee (yaʿsūb) wonder noted by Ṭabarsī with ʿAlī's "I am the yaʿsūb of the believers," and fīhi shifāʾ referring to honey (the majority view) over Mujāhid's "Qurʾān." Against this, al-Burhān [bahrani_al_burhan] and Qummī [qummi] preserve a dense taʾwīl tradition: "We are the bee," the mountains/trees/trellises as Arabs/non-Arabs/clients, and the "drink of varying hues" as the Imams' knowledge — al-Burhān even citing the Aghānī exchange where Bashshār b. Burd is corrected (the bee = Banū Hāshim). Crucially, al-Mīzān [tabatabai_al_mizan] cites these same reports in its baḥth riwāʾī but classes them as jary (application), not literal exegesis — a methodological line the narration-collections do not draw.
Age, ḥafada, and the slave-parables. On "the most abject age," two figures recur across all five: seventy-five (from ʿAlī, via Ṭabarsī/Ṭūsī/al-Mīzān) and a hundred (Qummī/al-Burhān), with Qatāda's ninety in Ṭabarsī. On ḥafada, the Imāmī sources (Qummī, al-Burhān) favour "sons-in-law" or "daughter's sons" ("we are the ḥafada of the Messenger"), while al-Mīzān, citing the Mufradāt, settles on helper-sons. On v.75, al-Burhān supplies the fiqh harvest absent from the others — a chain of narrations (Ṭūsī's Tahdhīb, al-ʿAyyāshī) deriving from "a slave having no power" that the slave has no independent marriage or divorce. For v.76, Qummī, al-Burhān and al-Mīzān's baḥth all identify "the one who enjoins justice" with the Commander of the Faithful and the Imams, while al-Mīzān frames both parables, against the believer/disbeliever reading, as arguments for tawḥīd and the root of prophethood.
Sources present: tabarsi_majma_al_bayan, qummi, tusi_al_tibyan, bahrani_al_burhan, tabatabai_al_mizan, enlightening_commentary; silent: none.