Every surah but one opens with the Bismillah, 'in the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate,' placed before the text as a heading rather than counted among its verses, which is why At-Tawba alone lacks it. An-Naml preserves the one clear exception to this pattern within the body of the Quran itself: Solomon's letter to the Queen of Sheba, quoted directly in the narrative, opens with the identical formula, 'it is from Solomon, and it is: in the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate' (27:30), making this the sole place the phrase appears as part of a verse rather than as a heading standing outside the numbered text.
Classical commentators read Solomon's use of the formula in a diplomatic letter to a non-believing monarch as evidence that invoking God at the opening of correspondence and undertakings was already an established, recognisable convention understood across the ancient world the Quran depicts, rather than a wholly new Islamic innovation. The detail is often noted in works cataloguing the Bismillah's occurrences, since it is the one instance a reciter counts the phrase as a numbered verse within the running text rather than as the unnumbered heading that opens every other surah.