Life and death word count in the Qur'an: Difference between revisions

This article lists all occurrences of the words "life" and "death" in the Qur'an. The purpose is to analyze the claim that they both appear 145 times. It can also serve as a reference for people who want to know where the Qur'an speaks about life or death.

The word "life" (الحياة, ''al-hayat'') is derived from the trilateral root حيي (h-y-y). In the Uthmani script, the writing style of the first Qur'anic manuscripts, it is not written like this الحياة (Simple Script), but like this ٱلْحَيَوٰةِ (Uthmani Script). This word count is complicated and it could not have been done in the English translation. This is because from the same root, there are many similar words derived and there is the verb "to give-life" which is translated into English as two words, including the word "life" itself, although in Arabic it is just one verb and the noun "life" itself is not present. When the English Qur'an says that Allah gives life to someone, then literally, he "lifes" him. It could be also translated as "resurrects". All verbs will be described as "verb" in the "Word class" column. Also there are words like "the alive" and "the living" referring to "living people" and they don't mean "life" itself (you can also notice they are written differently in Arabic). There are also 2 words translated as "life", but expressed with a slightly different word in Arabic, these words are also counted, but they are '''bold''' and can be easily excluded if we wanted not to count them.

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As we can see, besides the fact that there are only '''78 mentions''' of the word "life", there are only 114 nouns, so there is no possibility of finding 145 occurrences of the word "life", even if we counted even words like "snake" derived from the same root. If we wanted to get 145 words, we would have to mix word counts of nouns and verbs together! Also we can see that there are many words that are similar, but different, so if we want to use some special counting method, then there are probably dozens, if not hundreds of such combinations one could choose arbitrarily from.

The 78 mentions include words with prefixes and suffixes and these kind of words were often excluded in the word counts of those claiming this was a miracle for other words, for the reason of not being "basic form" enough. Using this method here, then, there are even fewer occurrences.

The word "death" (الموت, ''al-mawt'' or ''al-maout'') is derived from a trilateral root موت (m-w-t). Words derived from this root could be described similarly as the words from the root حيي (h-w-w). There is also the verb of "giving death" or "causing death" and words like "the dead" referring to dead people and not death itself. The difference here is that there are no words with a totally different meanings. All the words have something to to with death, dying or being dead. The word "kill" (''qatal'') is derived from a completely different root قتل (q-t-l). So translating the death-giving as killing might be misleading.

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|129||39:42||مَوْتِهَا||her death 42||noun 82

|130||39:42||تَمُتْ||die||verb

|131||39:42||ٱلْمَوْتَ||the death 43||noun 83

|132||40:11||أَمَتَّنَا||you gave us death||verb

|133||40:68||وَيُمِيتُ||and gives death||verb

|134||41:39||ٱلْمَوْتَىٰٓ||the dead||noun 84

|135||42:9||ٱلْمَوْتَىٰ||the dead||noun 85

|136||43:11||مَّيْتًا||dead||noun 86

|137||44:8||وَيُمِيتُ||and he gives death||verb

|138||44:35||مَوْتَتُنَا||our death 44||noun 87

|139||44:56||ٱلْمَوْتَ||the death 45||noun 88

|140||44:56||ٱلْمَوْتَةَ||'''the death''' 46||noun 89

|141||45:5||مَوْتِهَا||her death 47||noun 90

|142||45:21||وَمَمَاتُهُمْ||and their death 48||noun 91

|143||45:24||نَمُوتُ||(we) die||verb

|144||45:26||يُمِيتُكُمْ||causes you to die||verb

|145||46:33||ٱلْمَوْتَىٰ||the dead||noun 92

|146||47:20||ٱلْمَوْتِ||the death 49||noun 93

|147||47:34||مَاتُوا۟||died||verb

|148||49:12||مَيْتًا||dead||noun 94

|149||50:3||مِتْنَا||(we) die||verb

|150||50:11||مَّيْتًا||dead||noun 95

|151||50:19||ٱلْمَوْتِ||the death 50||noun 96

|152||50:43||وَنُمِيتُ||and (we) cause death||verb

|153||53:44||أَمَاتَ||causes death||verb

|154||56:47||مِتْنَا||(we) die||verb

|155||56:60||ٱلْمَوْتَ||the death 51||noun 97

|156||57:2||وَيُمِيتُ||and gives death||verb

|157||57:17||مَوْتِهَا||her death 52||noun 98

|158||62:6||ٱلْمَوْتَ||the death 53||noun 99

|159||62:8||ٱلْمَوْتَ||the death 54||noun 100

|160||63:10||ٱلْمَوْتُ||the death 55||noun 101

|161||67:2||ٱلْمَوْتَ||the death 56||noun 102

|162||75:40||ٱلْمَوْتَىٰ||the dead||noun 103

|163||77:26||وَأَمْوَٰتًا||and dead||noun 104

|164||80:21||أَمَاتَهُۥ||(he) causes him to die||verb

|165||87:13||يَمُوتُ||(he) dies||verb

 

*If we count all occurrences of the word "life" (''hayat''), including forms with prefixes and suffixes, we get 78 occurrences and for the word "death" (''mawt'') we get 56 occurrences.