وَلَقَدْ صَبَّحَهُم بُكْرَةً عَذَابٌ مُّسْتَقِرٌّ · فَذُوقُوا۟ عَذَابِى وَنُذُرِ
Wa-laqad ṣabbaḥahum bukratan ʿadhābun mustaqirr — fa-dhūqū ʿadhābī wa nudhur "And in the early morning a settled punishment came upon them. 'Taste My punishment and My warnings!'"
Root: ص-ب-ح. Ṣubḥ — morning. Ṣabāḥ — the morning hour. Miṣbāḥ — a lamp (what turns darkness into morning). Ṣabūḥ — a morning drink.
The verb is on the pattern of Form II (tafʿīl), and in Arabic this pattern, when built from nouns of time, gives the sense "to come at that time / to do something at that time": ṣabbaḥa — he came in the morning; massā — he came in the evening.
The literal rendering of the sentence, then, is: "the punishment morninged them." English has no such structure; it is rendered "came in the morning", and the time inside the verb is lost.
In al-ʿĀdiyāt this verse was cited ("And a settled punishment came upon them in the morning").
بُكْرَةً — Root: ب-ك-ر. Bukra — the first hour of the day, early morning. Bākir — one who is early. Bikr — first-born, untouched (the Turkish bakir, "virgin, untouched", comes from this).
Coming together with the verb ṣabbaḥa, the word narrows the time: not morning, but the first moment of morning.
And the observation about the hour that I recorded above is completed here: in verse thirty-four the rescue is bi-saḥarin (before dawn), in verse thirty-eight the destruction bukratan (as the sun comes up). Between them there is a space of time.
| Verse | Expression | What it says |
|---|---|---|
| 3 | wa kullu amrin mustaqirr | The rule: every matter comes to rest |
| 38 | ʿadhābun mustaqirr | The instance: a punishment that has come to rest |
The rule set down in the third verse of the sūra is realised in an event in the thirty-eighth. The distance between them is thirty-five verses.
I record this as my own reading. The wording of the two verses and the word's occurring in the same form are verifiable data of the text; the rule-and-instance relation is my reading.
| Reading | What mustaqirr means |
|---|---|
| Lasting | The punishment is not temporary; it is continuous, it reaches into the hereafter |
| Come to its place | The punishment has settled exactly into place; it has found its target |
I do not impose a preference. The sense of the root will bear both, and the use in the third verse stands closer to the second reading.
Verse thirty-nine repeats the command of verse thirty-seven in exactly the same words. This is the only place in the sūra where the punishment refrain occurs twice within one account (in ʿĀd it also occurred twice, but one at the opening and one at the close).