Have you not seen who went forth from their habitations, that is, from their familiar [spiritual] abodes and the habitual resting-points of their souls and [from] their stations and levels of this world and did not become dependent on them by the exigencies of caprice - such people being numerous?, [in their thousands], fearful of death?, [that is, fearful] of ignorance and severance from the real life and [fearful] of falling into the abysses of natural desire; God said to them, 'Die!', in other words, He commanded them to voluntary death or He made them die to their essences by the self-disclosure of His essence so that they were annihilated in the Unity. Then He gave them life, through the real life of knowledge or through Himself by means of the bestowed existence of the Truth and subsistence after annihilation; it is not far-fetched [to say] that what He means by this is what was meant by the story of Ezra: they went forth in flight from natural death, whereupon God made them die and then gave them life by attaching their spirits to bodies of a genus similar to their bodies so that they might actualise therewith their perfection. [Truly God is bounteous to people, but most people are not thankful].