Tafsir of Ash-Shu`ara' 26:54

"Indeed, these are a shirdhimah..." (He means the Children of Israel. The speech implies an omitted verb of saying; it is apparent that it is a hal [state], meaning: saying, "Indeed, these are a shirdhimah").

Shirdhimah means a group of people. It is also said: it refers to the lowly among them. It is also said: it is the remainder of everything base. From this is the phrase "a garment of sharadhim or shirdhamah", meaning tattered, torn rags. The rajaz poet said:

Winter has come, and my shirt is tattered rags, The covetous [person] laughs at it.

It has also been recited as li-shar-dhimah (attributing "evil"—shar—to a "blame"—dhimah). Abu Hatim said: "This is a recitation from someone whose [authority] is not accepted, and no one has reported it from the Messenger of Allah, may Allah bless him and grant him peace."

"...qalilun (few)": This is an adjective for shirdhimah. The apparent [grammatical expectation] would be qalilah (singular feminine), but it was made plural (qalilun) in consideration of the fact that the shirdhimah is comprised of tribes (asbat), each of which is few in number. The accursed one [Pharaoh] exaggerated in disparaging them, as he first mentioned them with a noun denoting scarcity—which is shirdhimah—then described them as "few," then used the plural of the few to indicate the scarcity of each faction among them. He employed the sound plural (jam' al-salamah), which has been noted to denote scarcity, and he deemed them insignificant in comparison to his own armies.

Ibn Abi Hatim reported from al-Suddi that Moses, peace be upon him, went out with six hundred and twenty thousand, not counting those twenty years old due to their youth, nor those sixty years old due to their age. Pharaoh followed them—with Haman at his vanguard—with one million seven hundred thousand horses. It is also said: Pharaoh sent in pursuit of them one million five hundred thousand crowned kings, with each king having a thousand [soldiers], and he himself went out with a great assembly. His vanguard consisted of seven hundred thousand men, each man upon a horse and wearing a helmet. They [the Israelites] were, according to what has been narrated from Ibn Abbas, six hundred and seventy thousand.

I say: They were fewer than the armies of Pharaoh, yet I do not assert a specific number for either of the two groups. The reports regarding this are hardly authentic, and they contain exaggerations that deviate from the norm. It is well-known among the Jews that the Children of Israel, when they left Egypt, were six hundred thousand men, excluding children, and this is explicitly stated in the Torah currently in their possession.

It is permitted that what is intended by "fewness" is humiliation, not merely a low numerical count; rather, this is derived from the term shirdhimah. This means that because of their scarcity, they are humiliated, not to be cared for, and their victory is not to be expected. It is also said: the humiliation is understood from shirdhimah based on the understanding that it means the remainder of everything base or the lowly among the people, and qalilun is either an adjective for it or a predicate after a predicate, for the apparent meaning is what has preceded.