A juz (plural ajza), also called a para in South Asia, is one of thirty roughly equal divisions of the written Quran. The division is made by length rather than by meaning, so a juz usually begins and ends in the middle of a surah; each is further split into two hizb and each hizb into quarters. Reciting one juz a night completes the whole Quran across a lunar month, a rhythm tied above all to Ramadan, when the entire text is recited in the nightly tarawih prayers. This portion spans Al-Hijr 15:1 through An-Nahl 16:128. Al-Hijr recalls the rock-hewn dwellers of Thamud and God's pledge to preserve the revelation, while An-Nahl ('The Bee') is a long hymn to the signs of nature, rain, cattle, the bee and its honey, as evidence of the Creator's care.
Al-Hijr's brief but vivid account of the rock-cut dwellings of Thamud, read in this juz, corresponds to real archaeological remains at Mada'in Salih (also called Al-Hijr, and now known as Hegra) in north-western Arabia, Nabataean-period tomb facades of the first centuries BCE and CE cut into sandstone cliffs that continued to be pointed to by later Muslim travellers and geographers as physical evidence of the Quranic account, though the facades themselves considerably postdate the Thamud of the traditional narrative. An-Nahl's long catalogue of natural signs, rain, cattle, the bee, is one of the Quran's most sustained arguments from nature to Creator, and its material on the bee's honey (16:68-69) is regularly cited in later Islamic writing on medicine as well as theology.