Bibliotheca Polyglotta

▪ Jeffery1938: »The last of these passages refers to the destruction of the army of the Elephant, and the others to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. In both cases the siǧǧīl is something rained down from heaven, and as the latter event is referred to in Sūra li, 33, we get the equivalence of ṭīn = siǧǧīl, which gives the Commentators their cue for its interpretation.¹ / It was early recognized as a foreign word, and generally taken as of Pers origin.² Ṭab. going so far as to tell us wa-kil wa-huwa bi’l-fārisiyyaẗ sank, which is a very fair representation of sang and gel (Fraenkel, Vocab, 25; Siddiqi, Studien, 73). sang meaning ‘stone’ is the Phlv sang from Av asan³ and gel meaning ‘clay’, the Phlv gīl,⁴ related to Arm kir (Horn, Grundriss, 207).⁵ From mPers it passed directly into Ar. Grimme, ZA, xxvi, 164, 165, suggests SAr influence, but there seems [to be] nothing to support this.«

1. Others, however, would not admit this identification, and we learn from Ṭab. that some took it to mean the lowest heaven, others connected it with kitāb, and others made it a form FiʕʕīL from ʔasǧala meaning ʔarsala. Finally, Baiḍ. tells us that some thought it a variant of saǧīn meaning ‘hell’. 2. al-Ǧawālīqī, Muʕarrab, 81; Ibn Qutayba, Adab al-Kātib, 527; al-Ḫafāǧī, 103; Rāġib, Mufradāt, 223; Baiḍ on xi, 84; al-Suyūṭī, Itq, 321; Muṭaw, 35, and see Horovitz, KU, 11; Siddiqi, 8, n., 2. 3. Bartholomew, AIW, 207. 4. PPGI, 120. 5. But see Hübschmann, Arm. Gramm., i, 172.

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