ثُمَّ إِنَّكُم بَعْدَ ذَٰلِكَ لَمَيِّتُونَ · ثُمَّ إِنَّكُمْ يَوْمَ ٱلْقِيَٰمَةِ تُبْعَثُونَ
The word order must be recorded, and this is the most striking place in the block: what is told from the twelfth verse to the fourteenth is in the third person (al-insān, jaʿalnāhu, anshaʾnāhu). In the fifteenth verse the address turns to the second person: innakum — "you".
I record this as my own reading, its ground being that the change of pronoun falls exactly at this point: while the forming is being told, the one addressed is outside — what is told is a third party. When death and resurrection are named, the one addressed is brought inside. The process described thereby stops being a piece of information and becomes a piece of news.
| Verse | Pattern | What it reports |
|---|---|---|
| 15 | innakum … la-mayyitūn — active participle, reinforced with lām | A settled, unavoidable state |
| 16 | innakum … tubʿathūn — imperfect verb, passive | A work to be done — whose agent is not named |
The difference is worth recording: death is given as a state (with a noun), resurrection as a work (with a verb). And the verb of the resurrection is passive — the doer is not named, because it is being named throughout the sūra anyway.
مَيِّتُون — the lexicographers dwell on the pattern of the word: a distinction between mayyit and māʾit is transmitted; the first is one who has died, the second one who is going to die. Here the meaning is "those who are going to die", and the lexicographers record that the pattern mayyit is used in this sense as well.
And the logic of the block must be recorded: twelve to fourteen tell that the human being passes through a process that can be seen. Fifteen and sixteen add two further steps to the same sentence: death and resurrection.
I give this as my own reading, its ground being that the three occurrences of thumma stand in one and the same series: the text does not build a separate proof for the resurrection — it presents it as a link in the series it is already working through. The same method was treated at Yāsīn 36/77-79 and at al-Qiyāma 75/36-40. I rely on that treatment.