Home > Surah 22 - The Pilgrimage
1. Numerical Discrepancy:
The text features a flat contradiction regarding the scale of divine time, defining a day as 1,000 years in Surah 22:47 but 50,000 years in Surah 70:4. An omniscient deity would not fluctuate on the baseline scale of His own relative time.
2. Arbitrary Harmonization:
Apologists claim these denote "different days," but the text provides no internal framework to distinguish between multiple types of divine days. This forces a reliance on ad-hoc arguments to fix the numerical disparity.
3. Rhetorical Hyperbole:
The shifting numbers point to human authorship. Using 1,000 and 50,000 interchangeably to mean "a very long time" mirrors common 7th-century Near Eastern poetic hyperbole rather than precise, mathematically coherent revelation.
The Quran Verse
Surah 22:47:
...And indeed, a day with your Lord is like a thousand years of those which you count.
The Contradiction
Surah 70:4:
The angels and the Spirit will ascend to Him during a Day the extent of which is fifty thousand years.
To the critic, an omniscient God would not be inconsistent with the scale of His own relative time. Is a "day with the Lord" 1,000 years or 50,000 years?
While Islamic apologists argue these refer to "different days," the discrepancy suggests a poetic use of large numbers by a human author rather than a precise mathematical or divine standard.