[He said, 'He says she shall be a cow] not broken, made submissive and pliant to the command of the Law, to plough the earth, the earth of preparedness with righteous deeds and acts of worship, or to water the tillage, the tillage of gnoses and wisdoms that reside therein potentially by exhausting the waters of acquired sciences and piercing reflections, since a cow of this kind does not need to be sacrificed; one handed over, its owners had left it to graze without being shepherded by exotericisms (rusūm), habits, laws and manners; with no blemish on her', that is, it does not have any convictions or dogma engrained in it for not being suitable for sacrifice. [They said, 'Now] you have brought the truth', firm [truth] illustrating the prepared one who yearns and seeks perfection] and so they sacrificed her, even though they very nearly did not, because of their many questions, exaggerations and probing in the search and scrutiny of her state, and [because of] their superfluous talk in the attempt to seek clarification regarding her, all of which proves how the soul refuses to submit quickly and refrain from spiritual discipline and the prevalence upon it of curiosity: their difficulty in [finding] what they sought and their procrastination regarding it is because of that. That is why the Messenger of God said: 'Had they seized the nearest cow and sacrificed them it would have sufficed them, but they made it more difficult and so God made it more difficult for them. In other words, had they not been so obstrusive in seeking her out and asking [about her] what they sought would not have been so difficult for them on account of the strength of their acceptance and their will: the one who is compliant is easy to lead. The Prophet forbade excessive questioning, saying 'Verily too much questioning destroyed those before you'. God, exalted be He, says: do not ask about things, which if disclosed to you, would trouble you [Q. 5:101]. The story of this is that a calf with that description was born to an old man from among the Children of Israel who had an infant son. He brought it to his old wife and told her that it would be this infant's and that she should let it graze freely until he comes of age, that perhaps it might be of benefit to him. When this incident took place and the Children of Israel had been seeking out the cow for forty years, the old woman heard about it and informed her son, who had now grown up, about what his father had said. So he went to the field and found her there and took it. They then began to bargain with him over her, but the old woman forbade him from selling her until they paid her weight in gold: the old man represents the spirit, the old woman corporeal nature, his infant son the intellect which issues from the spirit; the slaughtered young man is the heart. The old man of the spirit handed over the calf of the soul to the old woman of nature so that it would graze in the grazing field of natural pleasures until such time as it had grown, that perhaps the infant of the intellect might profit from it upon coming of age by the extraction of intelligibles from their sensory forms and the use of reflection that constitutes one of its faculties in the acquisition of rational sciences, which is what he [the young man] brought from the grazing field. The forty-year endeavour of the Children of Israel is an allusion to the journeying to God with deeds, manners and the adoption of the character traits until the time for the true coming of age and the disengagement of the heart arrives, as God says: when he is mature and reaches forty years [Q. 46:15]. Their bargaining over her [the cow] is an allusion to the quest of the spiritual powers that are illumined by the light of the guidance of the Law and [by] the will, and the extraction of these [spiritual powers] from an intellect blemished by illusion and the enslavement of these [powers] by the intellect by means of analogical intelligibles and the subjugation of these through reflective processes, and their being veiled from the light of the guidance of the Law by means of rational analogies and their not being adorned by matters of the Law: that is what necessarily caused their officious questioning, their delaying and procrastination in fulfilling [God's demand]. The old woman's prohibition [to her son] is nature's resistance to comply with the Law and the intellect's conforming to that [resistance], since the intellect takes the side of nature far more into consideration than it does the Law when it comes to one's best interests in terms of [securing one's] livelihood, with the improved lifestyle, empowerment and enrichment that it brings for it. Selling the cow for the equivalent of her weight in gold is an allusion to its being adorned, after its sacrifice and skinning, with the beneficial sciences of the Law, the intellectual moral [sciences] and the secondary stipulations of religion so that her form is subsumed by these [sciences], [the form] which conforms to the intellect and nature and benefits both of these when they employ her for the purpose of securing the welfare of livelihood, natural desiderata and the intellectual and practical pursuits sanctioned by the Law as being wholesome, as well as what is permissible behaviour and various kinds of dispensations for all forms of enjoyment once perfection and complete wayfaring have been achieved.