Jabir's Goat, and the Feeding of a Thousand

Shaykh Yasir Qadhi explains:

Jābir ibn ʿAbdullāh, then a young man of about seventeen or eighteen, roughly a year and a half into his marriage, returned home one day from the trench visibly shaken, having just seen the stone tied to the Prophet's ﷺ stomach against hunger. He told his wife he could not bear it, and asked what food they had at home. She had only a little bread and a small, young goat not normally fit for slaughter. Jābir told her to prepare the bread while he sacrificed the goat, so they could at least offer the Prophet ﷺ a modest meal.

Once the food was cooking, Jābir went and quietly ("sārartuhu," he said, "I whispered to him") invited the Prophet ﷺ to bring along one or two others, since the animal was so small. To his surprise, the Prophet ﷺ stood and announced to the entire workforce: "O people of the Trench! Jābir has prepared food for us, come, all of you!" Alarmed, Jābir ran home ahead of the crowd, worried about how a single small goat could possibly feed everyone. When he told his wife what had happened, she asked only whether it was Jābir himself or the Prophet ﷺ who had made the announcement; on hearing it was the Prophet ﷺ, her confidence was immediate, if he had announced it, he would provide for it.

At the house, the Prophet ﷺ instructed Jābir not to remove the pot from the fire or the bread from the oven until he arrived. Once there, he spat into the pot and the dough, his saliva carrying blessing (barakah), and made duʿā' over the food. He then had the gathered Companions enter ten at a time; each group ate its fill and left, making room for the next ten, until every person present had eaten to satisfaction. A later narrator asked Jābir roughly how many people that would have amounted to; Jābir estimated around a thousand, the entire workforce of the Trench, fed from one small goat and a little bread.

Dr. Qadhi highlights this as perhaps the single largest-scale food miracle recorded in the Sīrah in terms of sheer quantity, and uses it to explain the meaning of barakah: an increase in good (ziyādat al-khayr) in which the apparent quantity of a thing remains the same while its capacity to provide is multiplied, the same principle invoked in the supplication "Allāhumma bārik lanā fī mā razaqtanā," asking Allah to make whatever little one has stretch to cover far more than its apparent measure.