al-Muʾminūn 23:42-44

thumma anshaʾnā min baʿdihim qurūnan ākharīn · mā tasbiqu min ummatin ajalahā wa mā yastaʾkhirūn · thumma arsalnā rusulanā tatrā, kullamā jāʾa ummatan rasūluhā kadhdhabūh, fa-atbaʿnā baʿḍahum baʿḍan wa jaʿalnāhum aḥādīth, fa-buʿdan li-qawmin lā yuʾminūn

"Then after them We brought into being other generations. No community outruns its term, nor can they put it back. Then We sent Our messengers one after another. Whenever its messenger came to a community, they denied him. So We made them follow one after another, and We made them tales. Away with a people who do not believe!"

The original of the word is watrā; the initial wāw has turned into a tāʾ — the lexicographers record this change consistently.

The concrete sense of the root: witr — odd, not even. And from this arises the sense of coming one after another.

And the lexicographers' principal entry here is this: tatrā means to come in succession but not adjoining. Muwātara — coming after another, with an interval in between. The word, that is, carries both continuity and interval at once.

I give this as an entry about the language and rely on the lexicographers' description. And the choice of this word in this verse is worth recording: the messengers are named not as an unbroken chain but as a series repeated at intervals.

A variant reading: tatrā (with alif, a diptote) and tatran (with tanwīn). It does not change the meaning.

The word order must be recorded: kullamā — "whenever". The conditional particle reports that there is no exception.

And the agreement of the pronoun must be recorded: ummatan is singular, kadhdhabūhu plural. The lexicographers explain this by umma being plural in sense (a community).

This construction was worked out at Sabaʾ 34/19. I do not repeat it here. A summary of what was recorded there:

The original sense of the root ح-د-ث is "to be new, to come about afterwards". Aḥādīth means the things that go on being told. And the build of the sentence is this: a community is turned into a narration. At the core of the root lies being new; a people's turning into a "ḥadīth" is its losing its actual existence and becoming something reconstituted afresh at each telling.

And the following finding recorded in Sabaʾ attaches directly here: "the measure of a community is, in the end, what is told about it. The verse names this as a punishment."

What belongs here is the difference of setting between the two verses:

The same punishment, in two different frames.

The root ت-ب-ع: to go after, to follow. Form IV (atbaʿa): to make follow after.

And the word order is worth recording: tatrā (the messengers one after another) and atbaʿnā baʿḍahum baʿḍan (the peoples one after another) give the same idea with two different roots.

I record this as my own reading, its ground being that the two expressions stand in the same verse: the verse builds two parallel series — the series of messengers arriving and the series of peoples departing. And the two stand side by side in one sentence.

The narrowing direction of the block must be recorded, and I give this as my own reading: the telling goes from detail to summary — an eight-verse narrative, then an eleven-verse narrative, then a two-verse rule, then a one-verse gathering. And the gathering sentence is attached to an attribute: li-qawmin lā yuʾminūn.