Sūrah 78 · Āyāt 17–30

The Day of Decision and the Ambush of Hell — verses 17–30

With Indeed the Day of Decision (yawm al-faṣl) is an appointed time, the sūra names the very tiding it has been arguing for. The present sources read verses 17–30 as the unveiling of that Day: the trumpet and the throngs, the sky torn into gates, the mountains dissolved into mirage, and the long description of Hell as an ambush for the rebels.

The Day itself. Ṭabarsī and Ṭūsī agree that mīqāt is "the terminus of a fixed measure for an event" (from waqt, as mīʿād is from waʿd). al-Ṭabāṭabāʾī presses the force of the verb kāna: the Day "was in God's knowledge, from the day He created the heavens and earth," a fixed bound "to which this world runs." On you come in throngs (afwāj), Ṭabarsī, Ṭūsī and al-Mīzān all note each nation comes with its like — al-Mīzān linking it to the Day We call every people by their Imam (17:71). On the mountains becoming sarāb (mirage), al-Mīzān offers the subtlest reading: not literal shimmering water, but the mountains "turned into a vain thing of no reality," once-solid masses reduced to an empty appearance — paralleled by God turning destroyed nations into "mere tales."

Hell as ambush. On mirṣād (lying in wait), the sources cluster: Qummī glosses it "standing ready," Ṭabarsī gives it as prepared for the disbelievers, or a prison, or a road set against the disobedient, and al-Mīzān (via al-Rāghib) reads it as "the place dedicated to watching," over which "is the passage of all people" — connecting it to there is not one of you but shall come to it (19:71). The crux of the passage is aḥqāb ("ages"). Here the present sources show the full spectrum: Qummī and al-Baḥrānī preserve concrete numbers (a ḥuqb of eighty years, the year of 360 days, each day as a thousand), and al-Baḥrānī's chain to al-Ṣādiq insists the verse "is about those who do not come out of the Fire," while al-ʿAyyāshī's parallel (cited by both Ṭabarsī and al-Mīzān) reads it of "those who come out." Ṭabarsī lays out five views and judges the best to be that the aḥqāb time the kinds of torment, not the stay; al-Mīzān concurs that "age after age, without end" does not conflict with the Qurʾān's affirmation of the disbelievers' eternity.

The vivid and the lexical. Ṭabarsī alone preserves the long ḥadīth of al-Barāʾ ibn ʿĀzib — Muʿādh's question answered by the Prophet's roll-call of ten transfigured classes (talebearers as apes, usurers overturned, corrupt scholars chewing their tongues), a tradition al-Baḥrānī independently records through Jāmiʿ al-Akhbār together with ʿAlī's teaching of the fifty thousand-year stations of the Resurrection. On bard (coolness) the sources agree with Abū ʿUbayda that it here means sleep; on ghassāq they agree it is "the discharge of the people of the Fire," paired with ḥamīm, scalding water, as the only "drink" of the damned. The closing a fitting requital (jazāʾ wifāq) draws from all four Arabic sources the same principle, stated most sharply by al-Mīzān: "man by his deed wills only the requital set against it."