Numbers 13 Footnotes

13:1–14:45 The first cycle of rebellions reaches its climax in the failure to take the promised land. The people were disheartened when the report of the twelve spies convinced most of them that overcoming the inhabitants of the land and their fortified cities would be impossible. The rejection of the land was a rejection of God and his blessing, suggesting a desire to return to the Egyptian bondage from which God had delivered them.

13:1-2 Numbers says the Lord instructed Moses to send out the spies, whereas Dt 1:22-23 suggests that Moses sent the scouts at the people’s request. Some commentators claim that the postexilic Priestly compilers adapted the earlier Deuteronomic account, which they speculate was written just before the exile of 586 BC to the format of the book of Numbers. But with many OT historical events, the human and the divine go hand in hand. Pharaoh, for example, hardened his own heart while God was hardening it for his own purposes (see note on Ex 4:21). Deuteronomy is Moses’s description of how he dealt with the people’s rebellion in rejecting the land, whereas Numbers tells the story from the standpoint of divine instruction.

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.