وَجَعَلْنَا نَوْمَكُمْ سُبَاتًا
- سَبَتَ ٱلشَّعْرَ — he cut the hair.
- ٱلسَّبْت — cutting; and the name of Saturday. It bears this name because it is the day on which the Jews cut off work.
- سُبَات — sleep; the cutting off of movement, of work, of perception.
- مَسْبُوت — motionless, unconscious.
"Ask them about the town by the sea: when they transgressed on the Sabbath; on the day they kept Sabbath their fish came to them in shoals, and on the day they did not keep Sabbath they did not come." (al-Aʿrāf 7/163)
The verb here is يَسْبِتُونَ and its sense is "to cut off work". The root, then, in the Qurʾān's own usage, carries the sense of "cutting".
Now back to the verse. The verse does not name sleep "rest" (rāḥa). Nor does it name it "ease". It names it "a cutting-off".
And this is an extremely sharp description of what sleep is. Sleep is not an activity; it is the stopping of activity. In sleep you do nothing; you cease doing.
| View | Explanation |
|---|---|
| Rest | Sleep is the interruption in which the body is renewed; hence its being counted a favour |
| The likeness of death | Sleep is a daily little death; a life cut every night and reattached every morning |
The second reading is especially meaningful in the context of this sūra, and it is supported by the Qurʾān itself:
"God takes the souls at the moment of their death, and those that have not died [He takes] in their sleep. Then He holds back the one for which He has decreed death and releases the other until a stated term." (al-Zumar 39/42)
"It is He who takes you by night and knows what you have done by day, then raises you up in it so that a stated term may be fulfilled." (al-Anʿām 6/60)
The verbs in this second verse are decisive: يَتَوَفَّاكُم (He takes you in death) and يَبْعَثُكُمْ (He raises you up). The Qurʾān uses the verbs of death and resurrection for sleeping and waking.
The sūra's addressee finds the resurrection impossible. The sūra reminds him that he dies once every night and is raised once every morning — and that, because he calls it "sleep", he does not notice.
I record this as a reading I have drawn by joining the verse's own word (subāt = a cutting-off) with the Qurʾān's other verses about sleep. Some of the classical exegetes make this link; not all do.
In the twenty-fourth verse it will be said that the people of the Fire will taste no بَرْدًا (coolness). And on one view the word bard there means sleep — because the Arabs called sleep bard, since sleep cools the body.
If that view is accepted, a link is made between the two ends of the sūra: the sleep counted as a favour in the ninth verse becomes, in the twenty-fourth, the thing withdrawn.
Since I do not rely on the certainty of that view I record the link as a possibility; I shall give the disagreement separately in its place.