And when you killed a living soul, and disputed thereon, an allusion to the elucidation of the reason behind the command to sacrifice a cow, which is that a rich old man from among the Children of Israel had a son, a young man, and he was killed by two of his paternal cousins, or others as well, who coveted the inheritance he would have received from his father. They dumped him on the road somewhere between [the dwelling-places of] the [twelve] tribes of the Children of Israel and each denied his murder. The command then came to sacrifice a cow and strike him with parts of her to bring him back to life so that he might inform [them] of his murderer. The young man then is the heart and the son of the spirit who was rich through the wealth of gnoses and wisdoms; his murder was a denial to him of his true life and the removal from him of true love which was his life after being captured by the two faculties of lust and wrath, namely, his two cousins - the animal soul or the totality of its powers. For the spirit and the soul are brothers by virtue of their effusion and birth from the same father, the active intellect, referred to as the Holy Spirit, [if understood] by analogy with what the ḥadīth states: 'Be kind to your aunt, the date-palm, for it was created from the surplus of Adam's clay'. The animal soul is the aunt of the perfect vegetative soul, if this [latter] is taken to be the aunt of the human soul. They slew him because they coveted the use of the rational meanings and wisdoms - that which constituted his inheritance from his father - to actualise their demands, their perfections and their pleasures by all manner of tricks, strategem and the concocting of ideas. They dumped him on the roads of spiritual and natural powers between where they lie. Their denial to one another of his murder was [the attempt] to transfer every faculty that produces corruption and sin to the other, and [to transfer] righteousness and innocence to itself, because of the mutual struggling and contending [of these powers] with regard to their acts and their pleasures, and [because of] the fact that each of these is veiled behind what suits it and [veiled] from what suits another, as well its deeming its own as righteous while that of its counterpart as corrupt; and God disclosed what you were hiding, of the light of the heart and its life by your capture of it.
