قَالَ رَبِّ إِنِّي دَعَوْتُ قَوْمِي لَيْلًا وَنَهَارًا · فَلَمْ يَزِدْهُمْ دُعَائِي إِلَّا فِرَارًا
"He said: My Lord! I called my people night and day. But my call served only to increase their flight."
Something happens at verse 5 and the whole character of the sūra changes: the addressee changes. In verses 2-4 Noah was speaking to his people; here he turns to his Lord.
And this turn takes place without any narrative bridge in between. There is no sentence like "long years passed", "at last he gave up hope". Only qāla (he said) is repeated and the address changes direction.
In rhetoric a change in the direction of address is called iltifāt. What the iltifāt does here is this: all the time in between is erased. The reader jumps straight from the beginning of the preaching to its report. How long it lasted — nine hundred and fifty years — is never said in this sūra; it is said in another sūra (al-ʿAnkabūt 29/14).
Root د-ع-و: to call out, to summon, to invite. The concrete picture of the root is trying to reach someone far off with the voice.
- daʿwa / daʿwat — to call a person to something. It is in this sense in this verse and in verse 8.
- duʿāʾ — to plead with God. It is in this sense in the last three verses of the sūra.
And these are not two separate words; they are two directions of the same word. That Noah uses the same verb throughout his work may be taken as a silent observation of the sūra: the messenger is the one who calls continuously; his direction changes, his verb does not.
A detail: daʿawtu is first person singular and in the perfect. Noah is reporting a finished work. This determines the character of the sūra — this is not a prayer but first of all a declaration. The prayer will come in verse 26.
Both words are indefinite and in the accusative (as adverbials); that is, not "a particular night and day" but "by night and by day" — a usage conveying continuity.
Note the order: night first. This order is widespread in Arabic and in the Qurʾān ("in the succession of night and day", al-Baqara 2/164; Āl ʿImrān 3/190). But it is meaningful here in addition: the night is the hard time for a call. The time when people are asleep, when no one is open to listening. Noah counts the hard time first, not the easy one.
I record this as my own reading. In the classical commentaries there is agreement that the phrase means "without a break, continuously"; drawing a further meaning from the order is not widespread.
Word order first. The normal order of the sentence is fa-lam yazidhum duʿāʾī — verb, object, subject. The subject (duʿāʾī — my call) has been thrown to the end. In Arabic postponement (taʾkhīr) most often conveys emphasis; and the place the emphasis falls here is the cause of the increase: what made them flee was not a pressure from outside but the call itself.
The construction لم يزدهم إلا — "it did not increase, except this" — sets up ḥaṣr (restriction) in Arabic. That is, the only effect of the call was flight. Not even a partial success is stated.
فرار, root ف-ر-ر: to flee. There is an interesting detail the lexicographers transmit about the concrete sense of the root: from the same root comes farra'l-dābba — to open and look at an animal's teeth to determine its age. From here the sense farr (to bring into the open) is derived, and it is said that fleeing too is a kind of "coming out / separating". I give this explanation as a transmitted report; I make no claim of certainty.
The best-known use of this root in the Qurʾān is in the description of the dog in the story of the Cave ("you would have turned from them in flight", al-Kahf 18/18) and in the context of war. Here the flight is not physical — the people do not disappear, they go on living in the same city. The flight is a flight from hearing. And indeed the next verse will describe its technique: fingers in the ears.
What these two verses set out is a phenomenon generally not taken seriously enough in religious literature: a well-intentioned and correct call can drive the one addressed away.
The Qurʾān records this in many places and treats it as a mechanism. One of the clearest expressions is this: "We send down of the Qurʾān what is a healing and a mercy for the believers; but it increases the wrongdoers only in loss" (al-Isrāʾ 17/82). The same structure: lā yazīdu … illā.
The point here is this: the same text produces two different results in two people. The difference is not in the text but in the party who encounters it.
The consequence of this for the messenger is heavy: the outcome itself cannot be the measure of the effort. If it were, Noah's report would be a report of failure. The sūra does not present it that way — Noah gives his account, he is not shamed.
These two verses describe a phenomenon familiar to anyone who has thought about persuasion. The insistent repetition of a view most often produces in the other party not reconsideration but defence. A person protects not the idea that is objected to but himself, the one objected to; and when he does that, the first thing he does is to stop hearing.
The sūra sets this down not as an excuse but as an observation of reality. Noah does not stop calling; he only names correctly what is happening. And in the next verse he changes his method.