The Third Question of Moses in the Story of Rebuilding the Wall

The third question Moses asked Khiḍr was when they reached a village and, due to fatigue and hunger, they wished for the people there to host them and offer them hospitality; but they refused. Despite this situation, when they saw a wall in that same town that was about to collapse, Khiḍr began to rebuild it. This caused Moses to ask whether he could have taken payment for this work to buy food with it: “So they both proceeded until when they came to the people of a town, they asked them for food, but they refused to offer them hospitality. Then they found therein a wall about to collapse, so he set it up straight. [Moses] said, ‘If you wished, you could have taken a payment for it.’”

The letter fāʾ in the phrases “fa-abaw” (“but they refused”), “fa-wajadā” (“then they found”), and “fa-aqāmahu” (“so he set it up”) is like the fāʾ in “fa-qatalahu” (“then he killed him”) in the verse “So they both proceeded until when they met a boy, then he killed him”.(306) This means these phrases are connected to “idhā” with the fāʾ of sequence, and the response to the condition is the phrase “He said, ‘If you had wished, you could have taken payment for it,’” just as in the incident of killing the boy where the phrase “He said, ‘Have you killed a pure soul…’” is the response to the condition.

Based on this explanation, as was mentioned in the exegesis of verses 74-76, these verses are telling one story in which Moses asked Khiḍr three times and received answers, not three separate stories. The main purpose of the story is to explain the three different questions of Moses and Khiḍr’s answers. Regarding the difference in expression between the first verse (the story of the ship) and the second and third verses (the incident of killing the boy and rebuilding the wall), an explanation was provided in the exegesis of the aforementioned verses.