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Are there any traditions regarding how many people Musa led out of Egypt after Firaun commanded him to leave?

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  • How do you expect someone to give you statistics of the people of Moses and how exactly would you judge the information's credibility ?
    – user19208
    Sep 24, 2016 at 12:38
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    The way any dictum is established in islam, authoritative texts. There are numbers on the age of various people, the number of people who fought in certain battles, the number of angels present at specific occasions or the number of their wings - I don't see how asking for the amount of followers of one of the major prophets would be unreasonable to inquire about.
    – G. Bach
    Sep 24, 2016 at 18:52

1 Answer 1

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  • The count of magicians who were brought to face Musa is not exactly known as "Ibn Kathir" in his book "al bedaya wa nehaya" as well as "Al-Suyuti" in his book "Dur al-Manthur" mentioned that there exists several numbers for them as following:
    • Ibn Abi-Hatem said: 70
    • kaab Al-Ahbar said: 12,000
    • Muhammad ibn Ishak said: 15,000
    • Abi-Amama said: 19,000
    • Al-Saddi said: somewhere between 30,000 and 40,000
    • Al-Qassem said: 70,000
    • Muhammad ibn kaab said: 80,000
  • For the people who went out of Egypt following Musa, it's mentioned in the book of "Dur al-Manthur" for "Al-Suyuti" that there was as following:
    • Ibn Abi-Hatem said that Ibn Abbas said: 600,000
    • Ibn Abi-Hatem said: 620,000 not counting neither young people below 20 years old nor old people above 60 years old
    • Abd ibn Hmed said: more than 620,000
    • Several people said that ibn Massoud said: 670,000
    • Ibn Abi-shaiba and Ibn Gharer said: 670,000

However, it's worth to be mentioned that there's no religious benefit to know either of those counts.

It's also worth mentioning that most of the sources those tellers are telling from are Israeli stories and we as Muslims are told not to confirm or deny such stories if they are not contradicting Islam scriptures.

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  • That's interesting, could you point to the sources al-Suyuti uses to establish this, and their reliability?
    – G. Bach
    Sep 24, 2016 at 9:46
  • @G.Bach I have edited the answer to include details Sep 24, 2016 at 10:16
  • Thank you. If I understand correctly, there are no ahadith tracing back to Muhammad regarding this?
    – G. Bach
    Sep 24, 2016 at 11:15
  • @G.Bach as far as i know, yes there are no ahadith regarding this. Sep 24, 2016 at 11:43
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    Why is this being downvoted? Al-Suyuti is a respected scholar, and the caveats in the answer are pretty clear that none of this is considered authoritative.
    – G. Bach
    Sep 24, 2016 at 14:56

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