Numbers 14:34

34 According to the number of the days that you explored the land, forty days, {a day for each year}, you will bear your sins forty years, and you will know my opposition.'

Numbers 14:34 Meaning and Commentary

Numbers 14:34

After the number of days in which ye searched the land,
[even] forty days
For so long they were searching it, ( Numbers 13:25 ) ; each day for a year;
reckoning each day for a year, forty days for forty years, as in ( Ezekiel 4:6 ) ; shall ye bear your iniquities, [even] forty years:
which number is given, being a round one, otherwise it was but thirty eight years and a half ere they were all cut off, and their children entered the land: and ye shall know my breach of promise;
God never makes any breach of promise; his covenant he will not break, nor alter what is gone out of his lips; men break their promises, and transgress the covenant they have made with him, but he never breaks his, ( Psalms 89:34 ) ; this should rather be rendered only, "ye shall know my breach"; experience a breach made upon them by him, upon their persons and families by consuming them in the wilderness: the Targum of Jonathan is,

``and ye shall know what ye have murmured against me;''

this same word is used in the plural in ( Job 33:10 ) , and is by the Targum rendered "murmurings" or "complaints"; and so the sense is, ye shall know by sad experience the evil of complaining and murmuring against me. The Vulgate Latin version is,

``ye shall know my vengeance;''

and so the Septuagint,

``ye shall know the fury of my anger''

which give the sense, though not a literal version of the words.

Numbers 14:34 In-Context

32 But for you, all your corpses will fall in this desert.

33 And your children will be shepherds in the desert forty years, and you will bear your unfaithfulness until {all your corpses have fallen} in the desert.

34 According to the number of the days that you explored the land, forty days, {a day for each year}, you will bear your sins forty years, and you will know my opposition.'

35 I, Yahweh, have spoken; I will surely do this to all this evil community who has banded together against me. In this desert they will come to an end, and there they will die."

36 As for the men whom Moses sent to explore the land, who returned and made the community grumble against him by spreading a report over the land,

Footnotes

• [a]. Hebrew "day"
• [b]. Hebrew "day"
• [c]. Literally "a day for a year a day for a year"
• [d]. Hebrew "year"