Numbers 13 Footnotes

13:25 The scouting mission extended all the way into southern Lebanon, a total of about 240 miles. The forty day journey is a realistic time period for covering that distance. Kadesh is mentioned in the region of the Wilderness of Paran, which also contains the Wilderness of Zin.

13:28-29 Some commentators considered the list of peoples living in the land to be a later description of the population of Canaan, the Hethites being those living south of Hebron in the time of Ezekiel and the Amorites not residing in Canaan until after the time of David. They reached these conclusions because those peoples were not mentioned in other sources dating from the time of Israel’s wilderness sojourn. Recent discoveries, however, confirm the biblical data, revealing that a mixture of ethnic groups occupied the land of Canaan during the Late Bronze (1550–1200 BC) and Iron I (1200–1000 BC) eras.