يَوْمَ يَسْمَعُونَ ٱلصَّيْحَةَ بِٱلْحَقِّ ۚ ذَٰلِكَ يَوْمُ ٱلْخُرُوجِ
Its concrete sense: to shout aloud, to cry out. Ṣayḥa — a single cry (the faʿla pattern conveys a single occurrence); ṣiyāḥ — shouting; ṣāḥa'd-dīk — the cock crowed.
The Qurʾān uses this word in scenes of destruction: of Thamūd, Madyan and other peoples it is said "the cry seized them" (as at Hūd 11/67 and 94).
I record this as an observation: the same sound put an end to peoples in history; here it makes a beginning.
What was denied in the fifth verse comes back with death in the nineteenth and with the cry in the forty-second.
And the expression is striking: the cry is heard "with the truth". Hearing, that is, is no longer something open to interpretation. No dispute remains as to what is heard.
In the eleventh verse, after the coming out of a plant from dead ground had been described, it was said:
The sūra gave a definition in the eleventh verse and in the forty-second placed that definition as the name of a day.
| Step | Verses | What |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 6-10 | The things to be looked at are listed |
| 2 | 11 | Dead ground revives → kadhālika'l-khurūj |
| 3 | 12-38 | History, death, the reckoning, the Garden and Hell |
| 4 | 42 | yawmu'l-khurūj — the day is given its name |
And this completes what the sūra has been building from the start: the addressee finds the name of the thing he called "far" in the name of what happens in his own field.
I present this as my own reading; the places of the two words in the text and their being from the same root are beyond dispute.
One more note: the word khurūj has been chosen instead of "resurrection" (baʿth) or "spreading out" (nashr). And khurūj is more concrete than either: to come out. The sūra names the most abstract event with the most concrete verb.