13:32 Then they presented the Israelites with a discouraging41 report of the land they had investigated, saying, “The land that we passed through42 to investigate is a land that devours43 its inhabitants.44 All the people we saw there45 are of great stature.
tn Or “an evil report,” i.e., one that was a defamation of the grace of God.
42
tnHeb “which we passed over in it”; the pronoun on the preposition serves as a resumptive pronoun for the relative, and need not be translated literally.
43
tn The verb is the feminine singular participle from אָכַל (’akhal); it modifies the land as a “devouring land,” a bold figure for the difficulty of living in the place.
44
sn The expression has been interpreted in a number of ways by commentators, such as that the land was infertile, that the Canaanites were cannibals, that it was a land filled with warlike dissensions, or that it denotes a land geared for battle. It may be that they intended the land to seem infertile and insecure.
