Passing the Meeting Place

After receiving prophethood, Moses had an appointed time with God that had a specific time and place: “And We made an appointment with Moses for thirty nights and completed them with ten, so the appointed time of his Lord was completed as forty nights”.(55) He was aware of the time and place of the meeting and observed it, and no change or alteration occurred in them. However, regarding his meeting with Khiḍr, it was both a new matter through which God wanted to acquaint him with esoteric knowledge and the inner meaning (taʾwīl) of religious law, and He did not definitively specify an exact location for the meeting, only providing a sign for it. Thus, the incident of forgetting the fish occurred: “they forgot their fish,” and Moses and his companion passed their meeting place and appointment after forgetting about the fish incident, and traveled for some time. Then Moses said to his traveling companion, “Bring us our morning meal, for we have certainly encountered fatigue from this journey”.(56)

In the view of the teacher, ʿAllāmah Ṭabāṭabāʾī, what is meant by “meal” (ghadāʾ) in the phrase “bring us our meal” was the same fish they had taken with them(57) to serve as their provisions for the journey. It appears—although no definitive evidence was found for this—that this fish was not the daily food of Moses and his young companion, but rather only a sign from God that wherever and whenever this fish fell into the water, that would be the place of their meeting with Khiḍr. This is because in that wilderness where the two seas met, there was no person or other sign, so the fish was not meant for eating, because if they had eaten it, they would have had no sign. This meaning can be understood from the verse “He said: That is what we were seeking,” although the Qur’an did not state at the beginning of the story that whenever the fish falls into the sea and departs, that place would be the appointed meeting place and that time would be the time of their meeting.

It should be noted that the word “this” (hādhā) in the phrase “we have certainly encountered fatigue from this journey” indicates that this journey had special characteristics and was not an ordinary journey but rather an exceptional and tiring one, because Moses had undertaken journeys before; he had walked from Egypt to Midian and had also traveled from Midian towards Egypt with his wife and child, experiencing the hardship and fatigue of travel.