Uzair: Who Slept a Hundred Years in Surah 2:259?
A man passes a ruined town, is made to die for a hundred years, and wakes to find his food still fresh and his donkey reduced to bones.
Surah 2:259 tells of an unnamed man whom God made die for a hundred years. He woke to find his food still fresh and his donkey a skeleton. Commentators usually named him Uzair, equated with Ezra.
Surah 2:259 tells of a man who passes a town "fallen into utter ruin" and wonders how God could ever bring it back to life. "Allah made him die a hundred years, then brought him back to life." Asked how long he stayed, he answers "a day or part of a day." He is told: "Nay, but thou hast tarried for a hundred years. Just look at thy food and drink which have not rotted!"
The second half of the scene is even stranger. He is told to look at his donkey, which has become a skeleton, and to watch "how We adjust them and then cover them with flesh." The bones are reassembled in front of him. His response is simply: "I know now that Allah is Able to do all things." Time has passed for the donkey but not for the food, and not, it seems, for him.
The Quran does not name the man. Commentators most often identified him as Uzair, usually equated with Ezra, the scribe who restored the law after the Babylonian exile, and the ruined town as Jerusalem. Others named Jeremiah or the mysterious al-Khidr. Uzair is also named in Surah 9:30, in a statement historians find puzzling, since no Jewish group is known to have called Ezra the son of God.
Jewish tradition has close parallels. In the Talmud, Honi the Circle-Drawer sleeps for seventy years and wakes to a world that no longer knows him. In the Paralipomena of Jeremiah, or 4 Baruch, Jeremiah's servant Abimelech falls asleep for sixty-six years during the exile and wakes to find the figs he gathered still fresh. Readers today often see the story as a picture of stasis or time dilation.
In a Jewish parallel written centuries earlier, a sleeper wakes after sixty-six years to find his basket of figs still fresh, just as the Quran's sleeper finds his food unspoiled.
Scholars see a shared Near Eastern motif of the long sleep as a sign of resurrection; the man's identity as Ezra comes from later commentary, not the verse itself.
