^13:30Then Caleb silenced the people before Moses, saying, “Let us go up³⁷ and occupy it,³⁸ for we are well able to conquer it.”³⁹^13:31But the men⁴⁰ who had gone up with him said, “We are not able to go up against these people, because they are stronger than we are!” ^13:32Then 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. ^13:33We even saw the Nephilim⁴⁶ there (the descendants of Anak came from the Nephilim), and we seemed liked grasshoppers both to ourselves⁴⁷ and to them.”⁴⁸

The Israelites Respond in Unbelief

^14:1¹ Then all the community raised a loud cry,² and the people wept³ that night. ^14:2And all the Israelites murmured⁴ against Moses and Aaron, and the whole congregation said to them, “If only we had died⁵ in the land of Egypt, or if only we had perished⁶ in this wilderness! ^14:3Why has the Lord brought us into this land only to be killed by the sword, that our wives and our children should become plunder? Wouldn’t it be better for us to return to Egypt?”

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Footnotes

37 The construction is emphatic, using the cohortative with the infinitive absolute to strengthen it: עָלֹה נַעֲלֶה (’aloh na’aleh, “let us go up”) with the sense of certainty and immediacy.
38 The perfect tense with vav (ו) consecutive brings the cohortative idea forward: “and let us possess it”; it may also be subordinated to form a purpose or result idea.
39 Here again the confidence of Caleb is expressed with the infinitive absolute and the imperfect tense: יָכוֹל נוּכַל (yakhol nukhal), “we are fully able” to do this. The verb יָכַל (yakhal) followed by the preposition lamed means “to prevail over, to conquer.”
40 The vav (ו) disjunctive on the noun at the beginning of the clause forms a strong adversative clause here.
41 Or “an evil report,” i.e., one that was a defamation of the grace of God.
42 Heb “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 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 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.
45 Heb “in its midst.”
46 The Greek version uses gigantes (“giants”) to translate “the Nephilim,” but it does not retain the clause “the sons of Anak are from the Nephilim.” The Nephilim are the legendary giants of antiquity. They are first discussed in Gen 6:4. This forms part of the pessimism of the spies’ report.
47 Heb “in our eyes.”
48 Heb “in their eyes.”
1 This chapter forms part of the story already begun. There are three major sections here: dissatisfaction with the reports (vv. 1–10), the threat of divine punishment (vv. 11–38), and the defeat of the Israelites (vv. 39–45). See K. D. Sakenfeld, “The Problem of Divine Forgiveness in Num 14,” 37 (1975): 317–30; also J. R. Bartlett, “The Use of the Word רֹאשׁ as a Title in the Old Testament,” 19 (1969): 1–10.
2 The two verbs “lifted up their voice and cried” form a hendiadys; the idiom of raising the voice means that they cried aloud.
3 There are a number of things that the verb “to weep” or “wail” can connote. It could reflect joy, grief, lamentation, or repentance, but here it reflects fear, hopelessness, or vexation at the thought of coming all this way and being defeated by the Canaanite armies. See Judg 20:23, 26.
4 The Hebrew verb “to murmur” is לוּן (lun). It is a strong word, signifying far more than complaining or grumbling, as some of the modern translations have it. The word is most often connected to the wilderness experience. It is paralleled in the literature with the word “to rebel.” The murmuring is like a parliamentary vote of no confidence, for they no longer trusted their leaders and wished to choose a new leader and return. This “return to Egypt” becomes a symbol of their lack of faith in the Lord.
5 The optative is expressed by לוּ (lu) and then the verb, here the perfect tense מַתְנוּ (matnu)—“O that we had died.…” Had they wanted to die in Egypt they should not have cried out to the Lord to deliver them from bondage. Here the people became consumed with the fear and worry of what lay ahead, and in their panic they revealed a lack of trust in God.
6 Heb “died.”