fulfill My covenant, I will fulfill yours
وَأَوْفُوا۟ بِعَهْدِىٓ أُوفِ بِعَهْدِكُمْ
wa-awfū biʿahdī ūfi biʿahdikum — and fulfill My covenant, I will fulfill your covenant
In (2:40) the verb wafā (form IV) appears twice in one verse, once as an imperative addressed to the addressees and once as a first-person jussive, so that the same act of fulfilling a covenant is asked of one party and pledged by the other in return.
The verse commands: "and fulfill My covenant, I will fulfill your covenant" (2:40). The two verbs share the root و ف ي in form IV. The first, وَأَوْفُوا۟, is an imperative in the second person masculine plural, directed at the addressees, the Children of Israel named in the verse's opening address. The second, أُوفِ, is an imperfect in the first person singular, and the word data marks its mood as jussive. The structure is a mirror: the same action, fulfilling (أوفى) a covenant (عهد), passes between the two parties in opposite directions. Each party has a covenant attributed to it by a possessive pronoun — "My covenant" (بِعَهْدِىٓ) and "your covenant" (بِعَهْدِكُمْ) — so the verse attributes a covenant to each party by pronoun, one to the speaker and one to the addressees, each to be fulfilled by the other party, leaving open whether the two are distinct or one covenant seen from each side. The verse does not specify the content of either covenant, and this entry makes no claim about it. The jussive form of the second verb, following an imperative, gives the second clause the force of a conditional response: the speaker's fulfilling is grammatically tied to the addressees' fulfilling. The verse then closes with a further command, "and of Me alone, then, be in awe" (2:40), which continues the address but is outside the mirrored pair. Within the single verse, the repetition of the root binds the two parties' obligations into one reciprocal structure, each side's act named by the same verb.
Where it occurs
- 2:40 The verse pairs an imperative "fulfill My covenant" with a first-person jussive "I will fulfill your covenant", making the root's action reciprocal between the speaker and the addressees.
All Qur'anic expressions