Yāsīn 36:39

Wa'l-qamara qaddarnāhu manāzila ḥattā ʿāda ka'l-ʿurjūni'l-qadīm

"And the moon — We have appointed stations for it, until it comes round again like an old dried date-stalk."

There is a difference of case between the two verses, and it can be verified:

On the accusative reading the structure Arabic calls ishtighāl is at work: with wa qaddarna'l-qamara qaddarnāhu understood, the verb is present both covertly and overtly. A nominative reading (wa'l-qamaru) is also transmitted in the sources on the variant readings; on that reading the sentence takes the same structure as the thirty-eighth verse. I give no names; the difference in meaning is not fundamental.

An observation: on the accusative reading what comes to the fore is that something is done to the moon (qaddarnāhu — We appointed for it), whereas on the nominative reading the moon is recounted in its own right. This is an observation; it is not a preference.

Manzil — a place one comes down to; the halting place where a traveller stops. Its plural is manāzil. The root also occurred in the sūra in the forms tanzīl (5) and munzilīn (28) — in the sūra ن-ز-ل appears in three different derivatives.

The background of the word is concrete and must be recorded: the Arabs followed the moon's positions in the sky, called them manāzil al-qamar, and reckoned the seasons, the times of rain and the times for travel by these positions. The verse, that is, uses a word belonging to a calendar system the one addressed himself used.

This determines how the verse is to be understood: manāzil is not a concept foreign to the one addressed — it is the name of his own calendar. The proof is built not from an unknown fact but from a measure used every day.

عُرْجُون — the stalk of a date cluster that remains on the branch after the fruit has been taken off. As it dries it grows thin, turns yellow and takes on a curve.

ٱلْقَدِيم — root ق-د-م: to go before, to grow old. Here: old, with time gone over it. That is, drier still and thinner still.

The picture the simile gives: a thin, yellowish, curved sliver — that is, the crescent.

And the material of the simile must be recorded, and this is the most striking side of the verse: a heavenly body is likened to the dried branch of a tree in the courtyard of the one addressed.

I record this as my own reading, and its ground is what the thing is likened to: in recounting the sky the sūra reaches not upward but downward. The evidential section had begun with dead earth and continued with a palm grove; now the moon is recounted with a piece of the tree in that grove. Earth and sky are spoken of with the same vocabulary.

And the link inside the sūra can be verified: in the thirty-fourth verse nakhīl (palm trees) was named — in its fruit-bearing state. In the thirty-ninth the same tree is named — with its dried branch. Two occurrences five verses apart, in two different ages of the tree. I record this as an observation.

Word order: ḥattā — a particle announcing a goal; ʿāda — a perfect verb, "it returned, it came back".

The choice of verb is worth recording: ʿāda — not "it became" but "it returned". The crescent, that is, is not an end the moon arrives at but a beginning it comes back to. The word carries the cycle inside itself.

And the perfect tense is used — although the event is a recurring one. In Arabic the perfect is used for recurring events as well, in order to announce certainty; the lexicographers record this.