I began trying to put the descriptions beside one another.
There seemed to be a recurring movement: people are described, their relation to Allah Subhanahu wa Taala comes into view, and an outcome is named. Guidance and falah, success. Sealing and great punishment. Sickness increased and painful punishment.
But my first way of stating that pattern was too simple. I had spoken as though guidance was placed upon the first people after their qualities were listed. The wording is that they are upon guidance from their Rabb. It is not another action verb parallel to “sealed” or “increased”.
That difference interested me too. I had read that a jumla ismiyya, a nominal sentence, is free from time. What did that mean here? How much could the contrast with an action verb tell me about this passage? And why was the designation Rabb used here, while the other clauses named Allah Subhanahu wa Taala as the agent of an action?
I wanted to keep the comparison exact enough that I could see both the resemblance and the differences.
The wording is set out side by side in the accompanying reading note, so the similarities do not hide the differences.
At one point I wondered whether the short description of the second group could reflect anger, while the third group's complexity called for more explanation. I could see why that occurred to me. I could not yet establish it from the passage.
There was another complication. Within the examples attached to the third description, the word kafireen appears too. If kufr is present here as well as in the second description, perhaps my categories are not three sealed boxes. Could those under anger include people who are also astray, as well as others? The different behaviours might matter without making the groups entirely separate. Baqarah 2:19
So I wanted the observations written down, but not all on the same level. What had I noticed? What could I actually establish from the language? What remained an open question?
And I did not want to search the whole Quran to settle it immediately. For this stage, I wanted to stay with what I had read, through the end of these examples. Later reading might strengthen a connection or overturn it. I wanted that change to remain part of the journey, rather than have a finished answer brought back from pages I had not reached.