Ash-Shu'ara · Makki · ayah 167 of 227

Ash-Shu'ara 26:167

قَالُوا۟ لَئِن لَّمْ تَنتَهِ يَـٰلُوطُ لَتَكُونَنَّ مِنَ ٱلْمُخْرَجِينَ

“They said, "If you do not desist, O Lot, you will surely be of those evicted."”

Saheeh International

Essence

Lut's people answer his words with an ultimatum: stop forbidding us, or join the list of those we have already driven out.

A reflection

The barrier asked to take itself away

Lam tantahi: if you do not stop. The verb comes from a root whose first picture is a limit, the point where a thing comes to its end. The lexicons give a striking image. A nihy is a pool where flood-water comes to rest behind a barrier that stops it spilling. To forbid, nahā, is to bring an act to its end. The mind is called nuhā, because it holds a person back from what is ugly.

Now read the threat again with that picture. The concise commentaries all explain what Lut was to stop. It was his forbidding of their deed, and his naming of it as foul. So the town uses one form of the root to silence another. Stop your stopping, they say. Come to your own limit, so that we need have none.

A sluice keeper on a low-lying fen works a set of old wooden gates. Every winter the farmers upstream grumble that he holds the water back too long. One wet year they petition to have him replaced and the gates left open. The village below learns in a single night what those gates were for.

Lut was the last barrier in a town that had removed every other. His words held something back. The demand that he desist was a demand that the water be allowed to run wherever it liked.

There is a question here for any household, workplace or circle of friends. Who is the one person still saying no? And is the pressure on them to stop really a request for peace, or a request for the flood?

The full entry has 5 more reflections, questions to sit with, and "Live it today" - with the words, the roots and the tafsir alongside. Free, no account, works offline.