Immediately after the opening command to arise and warn, Al-Muddaththir gives a compressed sequence of further instructions: magnify your Lord, purify your garments, shun idolatrous impurity, do not give expecting a greater return, and be patient for your Lord's sake (74:3-7). Classical commentators read this brief cluster as an early ethical and ritual charter given at the very outset of public prophethood, addressing devotion, personal cleanliness, avoidance of idolatry, generosity without self-interested motive, and endurance, in a single tightly packed sequence rather than across the more extended legislation found later in the Quran's Medinan material.
Commentators note the instruction on garments, 'purify your garments,' has been read in two registers, literally as ordinary cleanliness and symbolically as moral purification, without the classical tradition settling decisively on one reading over the other, since both senses were considered compatible rather than competing. The cluster's placement at the very start of public preaching, before any narrative or legal material, is read by some exegetes as establishing that personal conduct and inward orientation were addressed before doctrine was elaborated at length.