Sūrah 105 · Āyāt 3–5

Birds in flocks, stones of sijjīl, devoured chaff (105:3–5)

Verses 3–5 narrate the means of the deliverance, and al-Ṭabāṭabāʾī (al-Mīzān) flags their grammatical role: {And He sent against them birds in flocks} and what follows are an ʿaṭf tafsīr — an explanatory apposition on “Did He not make their plot go astray?” The “how” of the foiling is the birds. On {abābīl}, the lexical sources agree it denotes scattered companies, troop upon troop. al-Ṭabarsī and al-Ṭūsī both record, from Abū ʿUbayda and al-Farrāʾ, that the word has no singular (like ʿabābīd, shamāṭīṭ), noting the minority claims of a singular — al-Kisāʾī’s ibbawl (like ʿijawl), al-Ruwāsī’s ibāla — and Ibn ʿAbbās’s and Qatāda’s gloss “following one another, successive.” al-Ṭabāṭabāʾī gives the same core sense tersely. The descriptions diverge picturesquely: al-Ṭabarsī collects reports that the birds had “trunks like birds’ trunks and palms like dogs’ palms” (Ibn ʿAbbās), fangs (al-Rabīʿ), or were green with yellow beaks (Saʿīd b. Jubayr) or black sea-birds (Qatāda); the Enlightening Commentary, more soberly, likens them to swallows from the Red Sea.

On {stones of sijjīl}, the sources canvass the same etymologies. al-Ṭūsī gives the fullest range: Abū ʿUbayda’s “everything hard”; the view that sijjīl is sijjīn (Hellfire) with nūn shifted to lām; “baked clay like fired brick”; and the Persian sang [u] gil (“stone-and-clay”), Arabized — a derivation he traces to Ibn ʿAbbās. al-Ṭabarsī cross-refers to his own fuller treatment in Sūrat Hūd and records Mūsā b. ʿĀʼisha’s measure (“larger than a lentil, smaller than a chickpea”) and Ibn Masʿūd’s report that a God-sent wind struck the stones and “increased them in force,” so each bore through whatever it hit. al-Ṭabāṭabāʾī likewise refers back to his commentary on Lot’s people for sijjīl. The Imāmī narrations in al-Baḥrānī and al-Qummī specify the mechanics uniformly: three stones per bird (one in the beak, two in the feet/claws), hovering over the heads and driving the stone through the skull and out the rear.

The most distinctive Imāmī contribution is aetiological. al-Baḥrānī’s narration from Abū Maryam ← al-Bāqir, and al-Qummī’s (echoed in al-Burhān), report that the stones raised smallpox (jadarī) on the victims’ bodies — “nothing of smallpox had been seen before that” — closing with al-Ṣādiq’s remark that “this smallpox is from that which struck them in their time.” al-Baḥrānī’s version adds that survivors fleeing to the valley of Ḥaḍramawt were drowned by a sudden flood, with a folk-etymology of the place-name (ḥaḍara mawt, “death came”); these narrational particulars are recorded as transmitted. The smallpox aftermath is, notably, independently attested in the Sunnī sīra tradition (Ibn Isḥāq).

On {like devoured chaff}, the lexical sources read ʿaṣf as the leaf, blade, or straw of a crop. al-Ṭūsī catalogues the views — Abū ʿUbayda’s “crop-leaf,” Qatāda’s “straw partly eaten and broken by cattle,” al-Zajjāj’s “blighted,” and the dialectal note that ʿaṣf is straw among Banū Ḥanīfa but nukhāla (bran) in Qurayshī usage. al-Ṭabarsī’s image is the most graphic: a crop eaten by beasts, dunged out, trampled and scattered — “God likened the severing of their joints to the scattering of dung.” al-Ṭabāṭabāʾī reads it as bodies left “without souls,” the stones having burned their insides, and pointedly rejects the “other interpretations that do not befit Qurʼanic decorum.” Both al-Qummī and al-Burhān gloss ʿaṣf plainly as al-tibn (straw). Finally, al-Ṭūsī and al-Ṭabarsī turn the episode into theology: it is an irrefutable proof against the materialists (mulḥidīn) — no merely “natural” cause sends targeted birds with prepared stones — and an irhāṣ, a portent paving the way for the Prophet’s mission; al-Ṭabarsī adds, against the Muʿtazila, that miracles may be manifested for Imams and awliyāʾ, not prophets alone. The Enlightening Commentary closes on the note the sources all sound: the gravest punishment delivered by the least means — a warning to every arrogant power.