The semantics of Self-sacrifice in the Holy Quran

"Self-sacrifice" as the highest degree of faith, has a wide range of lexical and idiomatic meaning; But commonly, the scope of its meaning has been so limited that it has appeared more in the meaning of "forgiveness and sacrifice". This paper, deals with the etymology and lexical meaning of self- sacrifice. Besides, it deals with different meaning of this lexical in Quranic verses and its and its application is compared before and after Islam. Then, place and its semantic relation in Quran are surveyed according to semantic fields. For this purpose, contents are presented in the name of "historical and descriptive semantics" and it is also stated with "descriptive analysis".Its lexical meaning includes any preference, both positive and negative self-sacrifice. In pre-Islamic era, its idiomatic meaning was common more than Lexical one, and it was more limited to tribal and individual motivation; But, Quranic verses, put it in service of new religions aims, and gave it divine intention and motivation. Considering the context of the Holy Quran, by maintaining idiomatic and lexical meaning, this word finds semantic relation with many moral and religious concepts: In idiomatic meaning, it and concepts like "goodness, sustentation, forgiveness, martyrdom" are placed in the same semantic field, In contrastive meaning also, it is located in the same field with words like" Stinginess, miserliness, curmudgeon, Stinginess spiritual", Considering relative synonymy, it is placed in the same semantic field, with the words "selection, preference, choice and choosing".