Another Qurʾānic passage used in the sīra to mark the contrast between Muḥammad's Arab believers and the sinful Children of Israel deals with the affair of hiṭṭa. The Qurʾānic story about it is again connected with a command given by Moses to the Children of Israel to enter the Promised Land. The scene occurs both in Surat al-Baqara (2):58–59 and in Sūrat al-Aʿraf (7):161-62. The former passage reads:

The command given to the Children of Israel in this passage is to enter the “town” (al-qarya), and while going through its gate, to say the word hitta and to prostrate themselves. Before we examine the literary role of this passage in Islamic tradition, it would be useful to clarify the Biblical origin of this Qur'anic scene. This has not yet been done by Islamists.

The main problem stems from the word hiṭṭa which the Children of Israel are commanded to pronounce while entering the gate of the “town”. The word has caused much trouble to Muslim commentators, as well as to modern Islamists. Several of the latter have tried to discover the Biblical origin of the word, but none of their suggestions seem satisfactory. The most interesting attempts have been those looking for the origin of the story in Jewish traditions revolving around various liturgical texts uttered by a king or a priest when entering the gates of the Temple in Jerusalem; this line of thought has inspired a recent study by Heribert Busse. However, the disadvantages of these suggestions are obvious. The suggested Jewish stories do not refer to the history of the tribes of Israel, they are not connected with the issue of entrance into the Promised Land, and above all, they lack the most essential element of the story as recorded in the Qurʾān, namely, the changing of the word hiṭṭa and the annihilation of those who have changed it.