Al-Maarij ('The Ascending Stairways'), 44 Meccan verses, answers a scoffer who demanded the promised punishment, describing a Day whose measure is fifty thousand years to the angels. It contrasts the anxious, grasping human with the constant in prayer who give the poor their due, and counsels 'a beautiful patience' (70:5). Classical commentary identifies the scoffer who demanded the punishment be hastened (70:1) with the Meccan al-Nadr ibn al-Harith or, in another transmission, with an unnamed disbeliever, a variation typical of asbab al-nuzul reports for verses that do not themselves name their addressee. The surah's list of the constant in prayer, honest with their wealth, faithful to their trusts and testimony (70:22-35), closely parallels a similar list near the opening of Al-Muminun, and the two passages are regularly read together in classical tafsir as complementary summaries of the same core ethical profile of the believer.
The surah's description of a Day whose length is reckoned at fifty thousand years for the angels and the Spirit (70:4) is read by classical commentators either as a measure of the Day's sheer subjective length for those undergoing judgement or, in a minority reading, as describing the ascent of angels through the tiers of creation rather than the duration of the Day itself, an interpretive division the text's own brevity leaves genuinely open. Its listing of those who guard their private parts except with spouses or those legally in their possession (70:29-30) is read by classical jurists together with the closely worded parallel in Al-Muminun as establishing the same sexual ethic in near-identical language across two separately dated surahs.