فَذَاقَتْ وَبَالَ أَمْرِهَا وَكَانَ عَٰقِبَةُ أَمْرِهَا خُسْرًا
Root ذ و ق (dh-w-q): to taste. And the choice of the verb is striking: for the punishment it is not "it saw", "it met with", "it suffered"; it says "it tasted".
The verb of tasting is the most direct of the senses. Seeing happens at a distance, hearing happens at a distance; tasting requires contact. And what is tasted enters into the one who tastes.
The Qurʾān often uses this verb for punishment, and it has an effect: the punishment is described not as a blow coming from outside but as something taken inside.
And a second effect: tasting gives knowledge. One who has tasted a thing has learned it. That is, the verse names the punishment at the same time as an acquiring of knowledge — something previously unknown (nukr) has now been tasted.
Root و ب ل (w-b-l). The concrete sense of the root: what is heavy and harmful. Wābil is heavy rain in large drops (it occurs at al-Baqara 2/264-265). Wabīl is what is heavy and hard to digest; wabāl is the heavy and harmful consequence of an act.
The lexicographers record that at the centre of the root lies weight: the rain's falling in large drops, a food's lying heavy, being caught under the consequence of an act — all from the same idea.
English reaches for the same image when it speaks of bearing the consequences of an act, or of a thing being on a man's own head: what is meant is a weight to be carried.
وَبَالَ أَمْرِهَا — "the burden of its affair". That is, the weight does not come from outside; it is the weight of its own affair. The punishment is described as the weight of the very thing that was done.
And this construction occurs in this form in several places in the Qurʾān — in this body of work it will meet us in the neighbouring sūra as well: فَذَاقُوا۟ وَبَالَ أَمْرِهِمْ (al-Taghābun 64/5). Two sūras use the same expression; one tells of past communities, the other of a town.
عَاقِبَة — root ع ق ب (ʿ-q-b): heel; and from this, "to come behind, to follow after". ʿĀqiba is what comes behind a thing — its outcome.
That the word derives from the heel is meaningful: the outcome is the thing that walks behind the deed. The one walking does not see it, but it is always there.
خُسْر — root خ س ر (kh-s-r): harm, loss. It is a commercial word: the diminution of capital. This root was treated in full in al-ʿAṣr; I do not repeat that analysis.
And the word's use here is the closing of the commercial-legal language the sūra has been building from the start: ajal (term), iḥṣāʾ (counting), shahāda (record), ajr (wage), ḥisāb (reckoning), and at the very end khusr (loss).
The sūra has been set up like a trading ledger: the period was counted, the payment was made, the witness was called, the account was settled, the balance came out.