Among Al-Fajr's opening cluster of oaths is a brief, enigmatic pairing, 'by the even and the odd' (89:3), which classical commentators read in several distinct ways without settling on one: some take it as referring to all of creation, since everything created exists in either an even or an odd number, others connect it specifically to the days of the pilgrimage or to the five daily prayers, some of which are prayed in an even number of units and some in an odd, and still others read it as pointing toward God's own singular, odd, indivisible oneness set against the paired, even multiplicity of created things.
The range of classical proposals is treated by exegetes as evidence of the phrase's deliberate compactness rather than as a failure of interpretation, since a two-word oath of this kind was apparently intended to gesture broadly rather than to specify a single referent precisely. The oath sits within a longer sequence, the dawn, ten nights, the even and the odd, the night as it passes, each invoked in turn before the surah's central question about whether these are, for a discerning mind, sufficient oaths (89:5), a rhetorical structure read as building toward that pointed question rather than toward a settled catalogue of fixed meanings.