We Shall Certainly Test You with Something of Fear and Hunger — The Trial and the Grammar of the Patient

Verse: "We shall certainly test you with something of fear, hunger, loss of wealth, lives, and fruits — and give good tidings to the patient." (2:155) — "We shall certainly test you" — the emphatic lam and heavy nun: trial is a definite certainty, not a possibility. "With something" — not all the fear or all the hunger. Allah administers doses, not drowning. A bearable amount. The distress you feel is less than what Allah is capable of sending — that is the mercy embedded in "something." "The patient" in the definite plural — why not "whoever is patient"? Because the glad tidings are for a group with a firm characteristic — those who are patient by nature and habit, not those who endured once. Lesson: the glad tidings came in the context of the trial — "give good tidings" immediately after fear and hunger. Relief does not come only after the trial — it is announced in the midst of it.