In previous parts we
estimated the time when our father Adam had descended to Earth, then the
time when Prophets Noah, Hud and Saleh (PBUT) were sent to their people to warn
them not to follow Satan and guide them to the right path.
Coming to the second group
of prophets: Ibrahim, Lot, Mosses, Jesus (PBUT).
Ibrahim and Lot
(PBUT):
Ibrahim and Lot were at
the same time, they lived in North Iraq then moved to Palestine after they
called their people but they refused to respond to them, so Ibrahim moved with
his family and settled in "Al-khalil" city (Hebron) and Lot moved to
Sodom villages which are located now beneath the Dead Sea between Jordon and
Palestine.
The emigration of
Ibrahim is mentioned in the following verses:
فَمَا كَانَ جَوَابَ قَوْمِهِ إِلاَّ أَن
قَالُوا اقْتُلُوهُ أَوْ حَرِّقُوهُ فَأَنجَاهُ اللَّهُ مِنَ النَّارِ إِنَّ فِي
ذَلِكَ لَآيَاتٍ لِّقَوْمٍ يُؤْمِنُونَ
24 وَقَالَ إِنَّمَا
اتَّخَذْتُم مِّن دُونِ اللَّهِ أَوْثَانًا مَّوَدَّةَ بَيْنِكُمْ فِي الْحَيَاةِ
الدُّنْيَا ثُمَّ يَوْمَ الْقِيَامَةِ يَكْفُرُ بَعْضُكُم بِبَعْضٍ وَيَلْعَنُ
بَعْضُكُم بَعْضًا وَمَأْوَاكُمُ النَّارُ وَمَا لَكُم مِّن نَّاصِرِينَ 25 فَآمَنَ
لَهُ لُوطٌ وَقَالَ إِنِّي مُهَاجِرٌ إِلَى رَبِّي إِنَّهُ هُوَ الْعَزِيزُ
الْحَكِيمُ 26
So
nothing was the answer of Ibrahîm's (Abraham) people except that they said:
"Kill him or burn him." Then Allâh saved him from the fire. Verily,
in this are indeed signs for a people who believe (24) And [Ibrâhim (Abraham)]
said: "You have taken (for worship) idols instead of Allâh, The love
between you is only in the life of this world, but on the Day of Resurrection,
you shall disown each other, and curse each other, and your abode will be the
Fire, and you shall have no helper." (25) So Lut (Lot) believed in him
[Ibrâhim's (Abraham) Message of Islâmic Monotheism]. He [Ibrâhim (Abraham)]
said: "I will emigrate for the sake of my Lord. Verily, He is the
All-Mighty, the All-Wise." (29:24-26)
From the following
verses, we understand the punishment on Lot people was to destroy their towns
by one hit that made their land upside down, or the highest of their houses the
lowest, which gives a sign that their land was swallowed into Earth, then a
rain of stones hit the people of Sodom killing them all, ALLAH says:
قَالُواْ يَا لُوطُ إِنَّا رُسُلُ رَبِّكَ
لَن يَصِلُواْ إِلَيْكَ فَأَسْرِ بِأَهْلِكَ بِقِطْعٍ مِّنَ اللَّيْلِ وَلاَ يَلْتَفِتْ
مِنكُمْ أَحَدٌ إِلاَّ امْرَأَتَكَ إِنَّهُ مُصِيبُهَا مَا أَصَابَهُمْ إِنَّ مَوْعِدَهُمُ
الصُّبْحُ أَلَيْسَ الصُّبْحُ بِقَرِيبٍ 81 فَلَمَّا جَاءَ أَمْرُنَا جَعَلْنَا عَالِيَهَا
سَافِلَهَا وَأَمْطَرْنَا عَلَيْهَا حِجَارَةً مِّن سِجِّيلٍ مَّنضُودٍ 82 مُّسَوَّمَةً
عِندَ رَبِّكَ وَمَا هِيَ مِنَ الظَّالِمِينَ بِبَعِيدٍ 83
They
(Messengers) said: "O Lut (Lot)! Verily, we are the Messengers from your Lord!
They shall not reach you! So travel with your family in a part of the night,
and let not any of you look back, but your wife (will remain behind), verily,
the punishment which will afflict them, will afflict her. Indeed, morning is
their appointed time. Is not the morning near?" (81) So when Our
Commandment came, We turned (the towns of Sodom in Palestine) upside down
[its highest its lowest], and rained on them stones of baked clay, in a
well-arranged manner one after another; (82) Marked from your Lord, and they
are not ever far from the Zâlimûn (polytheists, evil-doers,). (11:81-83)
The time of Lott people
Punishment or "Dead Sea Formation"
We know that the Dead
sea is located over the villages of Sodom, and historically its
name was "Lake of Lot", so if we can determine the time when it was
formed then it will be the same time of Prophets Ibrahim and Lot.
Let's review some
scientific facts about the dead sea..
[Science]
Quoted from
Wikipedia - The Dead Sea
… also called the
Salt Sea, is a salt lake bordering Jordan to the east and Israel and the West
Bank to the west. Its surface and shores are 423 metres (1,388 ft) below sea
level, Earth's lowest elevation on land. The Dead Sea is 377 m (1,237 ft) deep,
the deepest hypersaline lake in the world. With 33.7% salinity, it is also one
of the world's saltiest bodies of water, …The Dead Sea is 67 kilometres (42 mi)
long and 18 kilometres (11 mi) wide at its widest point. It lies in the Jordan
Rift Valley, and its main tributary is the Jordan River.
There are two
contending hypotheses about the origin of the low elevation of the Dead Sea.
The older hypothesis is that it lies in a true rift zone, an extension of the
Red Sea Rift, or even of the Great Rift Valley of eastern Africa. A more recent
hypothesis is that the Dead Sea basin is a consequence of a
"step-over" discontinuity along the Dead Sea Transform, creating an
extension of the crust with consequent subsidence.
From 70,000 to
12,000 years ago, the lake level was 100 m (330 ft) to 250 m (820 ft) higher
than its current level. This lake, called "Lake Lisan", fluctuated
dramatically, rising to its highest level around 26,000 years ago, indicating a
very wet climate in the Near East. Around 10,000 years ago, the lake level dropped dramatically, probably to levels even
lower than today. During the last several thousand years, the lake has
fluctuated approximately 400 m (1,300 ft), with some significant drops and
rises. Current theories as to the cause of this dramatic drop in levels rule
out volcanic activity; therefore, it may have been a seismic event. [1]
Quoted from - The
Age of Dead Sea
In the above
calculation, it was estimated that the Jordan carries six million tons of water
daily to the Dead Sea and that it deposits 181 million tons of magnesium
annually. However, on an average day more than double that amount evaporates
from the Dead Sea, and its surface does not fall, other sources must be making
up the difference.
A computation
that takes, as its basis, the amount of sodium in the Jordan points to a recent
date for the origin of the Dead Sea. The proportion of sodium to magnesium in
the water of the Jordan is about 4:1; in the Dead Sea it is 1:2. If the Jordan were the only source of the sodium for the
Dead Sea the age of the Dead Sea would be only about 6,000 years. But
the thermal sources on the western, eastern, and southern shores contain sodium
too; so may the submarine sources, which cannot be evaluated. It is likely,
therefore, that the sea has existed for only about four thousand years. When
again the fact is taken into account that the thermal sources are usually more
concentrated when they first break out and when they are at a higher
temperature, it may well be asked why the age of this sea should not be reduced
still more. It is probable that deeper levels of water have a greater salt
concentration.
Fifty thousand
years as the age of the Dead Sea was an unexpectedly low estimate: the rift in
which the Dead Sea is situated is considered to be the result of a catastrophe
at the beginning of the first glacial period. Now a
simple reckoning shows that the saline sea with the Jordan has not existed
longer than five thousand years. [2]
[Analysis]
From above, it's
clear the age of Dead sea is recent within thousands of years, some estimate it around 10,000 and some within 5,000 years, which can be close to the time of
Ibrahim, and if scientists can determine or calculate exactly the age of the Dead Sea, then we can know the time of Ibrahim and Lott (PBUT).
Let's discuss the
raining of stones, what it could be exactly?
[Science]
Quoted from: Researchers:
Asteroid Destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah
….Clay tablet
that has baffled scientists for 150 years has been identified as a witness’s
account of the asteroid suspected of being behind the destruction of Sodom and
Gomorrah.
Researchers who
cracked the cuneiform symbols on the Planisphere tablet believe that it
recorded an asteroid thought to have been more than half a mile across.
The tablet, found
by Henry Layard in the remains of the library in the royal palace at Nineveh in
the mid-19th century, is thought to be a 700 B.C. copy of notes made by a
Sumerian astronomer watching the night sky.
He referred to
the asteroid as a “white stone bowl approaching” and recorded it as it
“vigorously swept along.”
Using
computers to recreate the night sky thousands of years ago, scientists have
pinpointed his sighting to shortly before dawn on June 29 in the year 3123 B.C.
About
half the symbols on the tablet have survived and half of those refer to the
asteroid. The other symbols
record the positions of clouds and constellations. In the past 150 years
scientists have made five unsuccessful attempts to translate the tablet.
Mark Hempsell,
one of the researchers from Bristol University who cracked the tablet’s code,
said: “It’s a wonderful piece of observation, an absolutely perfect piece of
science.”
He said the size
and route of the asteroid meant that it was likely to have crashed into the
Austrian Alps at KÃfels. As it traveled close to the ground it would have left
a trail of destruction from supersonic shock waves and then slammed into the
Earth with a cataclysmic impact.
Debris consisting
of up to two-thirds of the asteroid would have been
hurled back along its route and a flash reaching temperatures of 400 Centigrade
(752 Fahrenheit) would have been created, killing anyone in its path.
About one million
sq kilometers (386,000 sq miles) would have been devastated and the impact would
have been equivalent to more than 1,000 tons of TNT exploding. [3]
Quoted from
Wikipedia - Meteor Shower
A
meteor shower is a celestial event in which a number of meteors are observed to
radiate from one point in the night sky. These meteors
are caused by streams of cosmic debris called meteoroids entering Earth's
atmosphere at extremely high speeds on parallel trajectories. Most meteors are
smaller than a grain of sand, so almost all of them disintegrate and never hit
the Earth's surface. Intense or unusual meteor showers are known as meteor outbursts and meteor storms, which may
produce greater than 1,000 meteors an hour.[4]
Quoted from
Wikipedia - Meteorite
A meteorite is a
natural object originating in outer space that survives impact with the Earth's
surface. A meteorite's size can range from small to
extremely large. Most meteorites derive from small astronomical objects
called meteoroids, but they are also sometimes produced by impacts of
asteroids.
Meteorites
have traditionally been divided into three broad
categories: stony meteorites are rocks, mainly
composed of silicate minerals; iron meteorites
are largely composed of metallic iron-nickel; and, stony-iron
meteorites contain large amounts of both metallic and rocky material. Modern
classification schemes divide meteorites into groups according to their
structure, chemical and isotopic composition and mineralogy. [5]
Quoted from
Wikipedia - Chondrite
Chondrites
are stony meteorites that have not been modified due to melting or
differentiation of the parent body. They formed when
various types of dust and small grains that were present in the early solar
system accreted to form primitive asteroids.
Origin and history
The parent bodies
of chondrites are (or were) small to medium sized asteroids that were never part of any body large enough to undergo
melting and planetary differentiation. These bodies accreted shortly
after the beginning of the Solar System's history, with 206Pb/204Pb age of
4566.6 ± 1.0 Ma years ago and matching ages for other chronometers. Although
chondritic asteroids never became hot enough to melt based upon internal
textures, many of them reached high enough temperatures
that they experienced significant thermal metamorphism in their interiors. The
source of the heat was most likely energy coming from the decay of short-lived
radioisotopes (half-lives less than a few million years) that were present in
the newly formed solar system, especially 26Al and 60Fe, although heating may
have been caused by impacts onto the asteroids as well.
Many chondritic asteroids also contained significant amounts of
water, possibly due to the accretion of ice along with rocky material.
As a result, many chondrites contain hydrous minerals, such as clays, that formed when the water
interacted with the rock on the asteroid in a process known as aqueous
alteration. In addition, all chondritic asteroids were affected by impact and
shock processes due to collisions with other asteroids. These events caused a
variety of effects, ranging from simple compaction to brecciation, veining,
localized melting, and formation of high-pressure minerals. The net result of
these secondary thermal, aqueous, and shock processes is that only a few known
chondrites preserve in pristine form the original dust, chondrules, and
inclusions from which they formed. [6]
Quoted from: Meteors
burn up when they hit the Earth's atmosphere.
A meteor moving
through the vacuum of space typically travels at speeds reaching tens of
thousands of miles per hour. When the meteor hits the atmosphere, the air in
front of it compresses incredibly quickly. When a gas is compressed, its
temperature rises. This causes the meteor to heat up so much that it glows. The air burns the meteor until there is nothing left.
Re-entry temperatures can reach as high as 3,000 degrees F (1,650
degrees C)! [7]
[Analysis]
The explanation
of "Stoning from sky" could be an asteroid that was
dismantled into smaller pieces, heated in the atmosphere and then hit the
people of Sodom.
The above facts
explain the raining as Meteor showering and it can be heated till 1,650
degrees C, and there is a kind of Meteor called Chondrite that contains Clay and can be dismantled
easily into smaller pieces due to the shock of collision with atmosphere.
Let's read again
the verses in Quran that described these stoning:
1- Described as "Rain"
which is close in meaning to Meteor showering:
وامطرنا عليهم مطرا فانظر كيف كان عاقبة
المجرمين
And We
rained down on them a rain (of stones). Then see what was the end of the
Mujrimûn (criminals, polytheists and sinners). (7:84)
2- Described as
being gathered all together and heated:
فَلَمَّا جَاءَ أَمْرُنَا جَعَلْنَا عَالِيَهَا
سَافِلَهَا وَأَمْطَرْنَا عَلَيْهَا حِجَارَةً مِّن سِجِّيلٍ مَّنضُودٍ 82
So
when Our Commandment came, We turned (the towns of Sodom in Palestine) upside
down, and rained on them stones baked (Segil), in a well-arranged manner one
after another; (Mandoud) (11:82)
The word "Mandoud"
is the same word used for the trees that have fruits over each other (banana or
dates), and this describe that the stones were collected in one piece then
fragmented into smaller pieces:
وطلح منضود
And
the trees of talh , (banana, or a fragrant tree) "Mandoud" having
layers one upon the other, (56:29)
ونَضَّدْتُه: جَعَلْتُ
بعضَه على بعض؛ وفي التهذيب: ضَمَمْتُ بَعْضَه إِلى بعض. والتَّنْضِيدُ: مثله شُدِّد للمبالغة في وضعه مُتراصِفاً.
And being
"Segil" some scholars explained that it was cooked in hell fire, but
we understand now that temperature was gained when the asteroid hits the
atmosphere, therefore it becomes so hot.
3- Being
Chondrite, made of clay.
The following miraculous
verse states clearly that these heated defragmented stones were made of clay or
had clay, which means it was of Chondrite type as explained above.
قَالُوا إِنَّا أُرْسِلْنَا إِلَى قَوْمٍ مُّجْرِمِينَ 33 لِنُرْسِلَ عَلَيْهِمْ حِجَارَةً مِّن طِينٍ 34
To send
down upon them stones of baked clay. (33) Marked by your Lord for the Musrifûn
(polytheists, criminals, sinners — those who trespass Allâh's set limits in
evil-doings by committing great sins). (51: 33-34)
Thanks to Allah, Lord of the Worlds
References:
[1] Wikipedia, Dead Sea, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Sea
[2] The age of dead sea, http://www.varchive.org/itb/deadsea.htm
[3] SliceofScifi.com, Researchers: Asteroid destroyed Sodom and
Gomorrah, http://www.sliceofscifi.com/2008/03/31/researchers-asteroid-destroyed-sodom-and-gomorrah/
[4] Wikipedia, Meteor Shower, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteor_shower
[5] Wikipedia, Meteorite, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteorite
[6] Wikipedia, Chondrite, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chondrite
[7] Howstuffworks.Com, http://science.howstuffworks.com/question308.htm
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