وَٱلْعَٰدِيَٰتِ ضَبْحًا
The و at the head of the verse is the wāw al-qasam: the wāw of the oath. God's swearing by created things is a device often seen in the Qurʾān — by time (al-ʿAṣr), by the star (al-Najm), by the morning (al-Ḍuḥā, al-Falaq), by the fig and the olive (al-Tīn), by the sky and by the day (al-Shams).
The common core of what is said in the classical sources about the function of these oaths is this: the thing sworn by is set forth as evidence. That is, to say "by such and such" is at the same time to say "look at such and such". An oath is a way of drawing attention.
This will matter particularly for the sūra before us, because the link between the content of the oath and the content of the judgement is the whole question.
Root: ع-د-و. The core sense beneath the root is to cross a limit, to pass from one point to another. From this single core there derive words that look very far apart from one another:
- عَدَا — he ran, he passed by swiftly. To run is to pass swiftly over the ground.
- عَدُوّ — an enemy. An enemy is the one who crosses the limit that lies between you.
- عُدْوَان — aggression, overstepping the bound. "Do not help one another in sin and aggression" (al-Māʾida 5/2).
- اِعْتِدَاء / تَعَدِّي — transgression, trampling on a limit.
- عُدْوَة — the slope of a valley, its edge. "You were on the near slope of the valley and they on the far slope" (al-Anfāl 8/42).
So Arabic puts the same root between running and enmity. Both are a "passing over": the one over the ground, the other over what is right.
Which sense is at work in this verse? The word is on the active participle pattern and is a feminine plural: al-ʿādiyāt — "the (feminine) ones that run". The English word "horses" carries no grammatical gender; in Arabic خَيْل (a troop of horses) is feminine, and so the adjective comes in the feminine too.
But the "enmity" wing of the root does not leave the scene altogether. The thing that runs is running towards someone; and in the third verse it will be said that this is a raid. The word carries both the movement and the direction of the movement.
Root: ض-ب-ح. The definition the lexicographers give is this: ḍabḥ is the sound of breathing that a horse makes as it runs at speed. It is not neighing (ṣahīl); it is the muffled, rasping sound the breath makes as it comes up out of the chest. Some of the lexicographers record that this sound belongs to the horse and to a few other animals alone — a detail that will be decisive in the disagreement we shall take up below.
A second use of the root is recorded as well: fire changing the colour of a thing, scorching it lightly (ḍabaḥat-hu'l-nār). There is a reading that joins the two senses, and it is plausible: the breath of a fast-running animal is hot; sound and heat are two faces of the same event. I pass this on as a connection made by the lexicographers, not as a settled etymology.
- A circumstantial qualifier — "by those that run panting". The verbal noun used in place of a circumstantial qualifier.
- The absolute object of an elided verb — yaḍbaḥna ḍabḥā (the verb "they pant hard" having been dropped).
- An accusative of purpose — this view is in the minority.
For the person who is the target of a raid this is exactly the order of events. First the sound comes — still in the dark, while nothing at all is yet visible. Then the sparks struck out of the stones. Then the first light of morning. Then the cloud of dust. And last of all, the horses in the middle of the host.
The five verses follow the order of perception of the one who is raided. The narrator stands in the place not of those who make the raid but of those who are raided.
I record this not as something transmitted but as a reading that comes out of the ordering of the five verses. But the ordering itself is plain in the text, and it is hard to count it as chance.