Sūrah 78 · Āyāt 6–16

The Signs in Creation — verses 6–16

Having warned that "they shall know," the sūra turns to proof. Verses 6–16 are one sustained argument from the order of the world: the earth as a bed, the mountains as pegs, human pairs, sleep, the night-cloak and the working day, the seven firm heavens, the blazing lamp of the sun, the wringing rain-clouds, and the grain and luxuriant gardens they bring forth.

The argument. al-Ṭabāṭabāʾī (al-Mīzān) states the logic explicitly: the witnessed cosmos "cannot be a vain play with no fixed abiding goal," so this changing order "is necessarily succeeded by a world of fixed abiding order" in which the rectitude the human fiṭra calls to and the corruption it repels finally bear fruit — "the felicity of the God-wary and the wretchedness of the corrupt" that "has not appeared in this world." He prefers this argument-from-purpose over the weaker argument-from-power (the One who originates can restore), "because the context here is occurrence, not [mere] possibility." The Enlightening Commentary reads the same verses as "examples of the types of Divine Power … as evidences to the possibility of the Resurrection."

The lexicon of the verses. The four classical sources move almost word by word. On mihād (resting-place) all agree it is the smoothed, settled bed of the earth; Qummī adds the homely image that "man is bedded down upon it as in a cradle." On awtād (pegs), Ṭabarsī and Ṭūsī explain the mountains' bulk holds the earth "lest it sway with its people"; al-Mīzān offers a strikingly naturalistic gloss — the mountains as the cooled outflow of volcanoes that stills "the earth's agitation." On subāt (sleep), Ṭabarsī gives three readings (repose, cessation of activity, a rest that is not death), and al-Mīzān rejects the "death" reading as far-fetched, since "the Qurʾān calls sleep a taking, not a death" (39:42). On the night as libās (garment), al-Baḥrānī preserves a ḥadīth: the Prophet, asked why night is called layl, answered that it "brings men and women together in intimacy," a garment God made for them. On al-muʿṣirāt, Ṭabarsī, Ṭūsī and al-Mīzān weigh whether it is the rain-laden clouds or the winds that wring them, al-Mīzān concluding that min ("from") here carries the sense of bi ("by means of").

The texture of the witnesses. Where Ṭabarsī and Ṭūsī supply the philological apparatus (the lexicon of thajjāj as a gushing torrent "like spurting blood," and the ḥadīth "the best of the Ḥajj is the loud cry and the shedding of sacrificial blood"), Qummī's contribution is a string of terse identifications — sirāj wahhāj is "the radiant sun," jannāt alfāf are "orchards with densely interwoven trees." al-Baḥrānī adds a cosmological narration from al-Ṣādiq scaling the sun's light against the Footstool, Throne, Veil and Screen — a meditation on the disproportion between created light and the divine. Across all present sources the verses function as one chain of evidences, each natural blessing doubling as a proof of the Power that can raise the dead.