“O believers, be not like those who abused Moses!” (The Qur’an, 33/el-Aḥzāb:69)

The surah al-Ahzāb of the Qur’an contains many regulations concerning the Prophet Muhammad’s relation with his wives and his companions. One of such verses, verse 69, warns the believers about Muhammad not to be like those who vexed Moses. In order to better understand the allusion of the verse, this study first investigates and evaluates the comments regarding the nature of the vexation that Moses had had to deal with in light of the relevant Jewish literature, and, second, examines the comments about the problem that Muhammad experienced, which have been offered by Muslim exegetes in Tafsir literature, with a view to finding out the nexus between the case of Moses and that of Muhammad. The findings show in a comparative fashion that it was most probably about the Prophet’s marriage to Zaynab that believers are being admonished not to slander him because of this marriage with a reference to the accusation of adultery to Moses. This article concludes that the phrase “like those who vexed Moses” should be related with marital/sexual accusations.