Sūrah 71 · Āyāt 15–20

Sūrat Nūḥ 71:15–20 — The Argument from the Cosmos and the Earth

What the passage says. Having rebuked his people for according God no "dignity," Noah turns their gaze outward and upward. He points to the seven heavens built "in layers," the moon set among them as a borrowed light and the sun as a self-burning lamp (vv. 15–16); to their own origin "from the earth" like a growth that will return into it and be brought forth again (vv. 17–18); and to the earth itself, spread out "as a carpet" with "spacious ways" to travel (vv. 19–20). The whole sequence is an argument: the One who creates and governs all this is the Lord who alone deserves worship.

How the present sources read it. The four present witnesses (al-Baḥrānī is silent here) agree that vv. 15–20 are framed as a proof (the word al-Ṭabāṭabāʾī and al-Ṭūsī both use is ḥujja). al-Mīzān reads "Have you not seen" as "have you not known," and notes that because Noah's people already conceded that the heavens are seven, he "argued against them by what they conceded." He draws a sharp astronomical distinction preserved by all three Arabic commentators: the sun is a sirāj (lamp) because it is luminous of itself, while the moon is nūr (light) because it shines "with a light acquired from the sun" — "not luminous of itself so as to be reckoned a lamp." On "in them" (the moon's location among the heavens), al-Mīzān, al-Ṭabarsī, and al-Ṭūsī give the identical grammatical gloss: it lies "within their compass even if in one of them," illustrated by "in these houses there is a well."

On v. 17, al-Mīzān presses the literal force of "He grew you from the earth as a growth": man is no mere metaphorical plant, for "man's formation terminates in earthly elements… nourished, growing, and reproducing — the very reality of a plant," so the words are "literal fact, without simile or metaphor." al-Ṭabarsī offers three readings of the same phrase — the creation of Adam from earth (the people being his offspring, as in al-Nisāʾ 4:1), or all creatures nourished by what the earth grows, or simply growth "into bigness after smallness." On v. 18, al-Mīzān reads "returns you into it" as death and burial and "brings you forth" as the resurrection for requital, noting that the unusual phrasing ("and brings you forth," not "then brings you forth") hints that return and resurrection are "like a single act"; he aligns it with al-Aʿrāf 7:25 and adds that man in both states is already "in the abode of truth."

The grammatical and lexical layer. al-Ṭabarsī supplies the passage's richest philological notes — though, because his block opens the whole 15–28 unit, these preview later words too: he records the readings of Wuddan, fixes fijāj as "broad scattered roads," and relates the much-cited anecdote of the bedouin who, hearing "makran kubbāran," exclaimed "How eloquent your Lord is!" — which al-Ṭabarsī corrects, since "God is not described with eloquence." al-Ṭūsī uniquely pauses to classify the four senses of "making" (jaʿl) — origination, transformation, judgment, and summons — before settling that the heavenly bodies are "made" by origination. al-Qummī condenses the whole passage into two glosses ("one above another"; "upon the earth, a growth"), and al-Baḥrānī, carrying only narrations, has none to offer for these verses and is therefore silent. All four converge on al-Ṭabarsī's closing note: God "enumerated these kinds of blessings… to alert them to His deserving worship pure of all idolatry," so that they "must not meet these majestic blessings with disbelief."