al-Inshiqāq 84:5

Wa adhinat li-Rabbihā wa ḥuqqat "And it listened to its Lord — and so indeed it had to."

The second verse is repeated here word for word. Not a letter changes.

This is the sūra's most conspicuous structural move, and its purpose is plain: sky and earth are told with the same sentence.

Let us set the symmetry side by side:

The only asymmetry between the two blocks is the earth's taking one verb more: alqat wa takhallat. The sky is only split; the earth is not split, it is emptied.

The reason for this difference is plain: man lives on the earth. There is nothing man has hidden inside the sky; inside the earth there is — his dead, his goods, his traces. For this reason two extra verbs were needed for the earth.

The same sentence coming twice is no coincidence in Arabic. The work it does here is as follows:

First, it establishes a common ruling. Two different events (the splitting and the emptying) are ended with the same sentence and so put into a single category: both are obedience. That is, the Resurrection is not the collapse of an order; it is the carrying out of a command.

Second, it establishes scale. Sky and earth — the two ends of the realm of being. When both are described with the same sentence, nothing at all is left undescribed. The most economical way of saying "everything listened to its Lord" is to use the same sentence for the two extremes.

Third, it leaves man outside. And this is the real matter. The sky listened, the earth listened. In the sixth verse the address comes: "O man!" He is the only being missing from the list.

The sūra does not say this; it lets it be felt through the ordering. I record it as my own reading, but the ordering belongs to the text.