Seven Earths to Match Seven Heavens

At-Talaq closes its procedural legislation with a cosmological statement set apart from everything preceding it: 'God is the one who created seven heavens and of the earth, the like of them' (65:12). Classical commentators read 'the like of them' as indicating seven earths corresponding in number to the seven heavens referenced elsewhere in the Quran, though the exact nature of these seven earths, whether layered strata, subterranean regions or realms otherwise unspecified, is treated across the exegetical tradition as a matter the verse itself does not clarify, generating a range of classical proposals none of which claims certainty beyond the number itself.

The verse's placement at the close of a surah otherwise devoted entirely to marriage and divorce procedure is noted by commentators as a deliberate widening of scope, moving from detailed household regulation to a statement about the whole architecture of creation, read as reminding the reader that even the most intimate domestic law is legislated by the same God who structured the heavens and the earth in their entirety, rather than by a lesser or merely civil authority. Later jurists also debated whether the seven earths, if taken as physical strata, could be reconciled with observational geography, generally concluding that the verse describes a cosmological structure beyond ordinary empirical description rather than the layered rock of the planet itself.