Numbers 14:35

35 '¹I, the LORD, have spoken, surely * this I will do to all this evil congregation who are gathered together against Me. In this wilderness they shall be destroyed, and there they will die.' "

Numbers 14:35 Meaning and Commentary

Numbers 14:35

I the Lord have said
Determined, resolved on doing what I have declared, and again repeat it; the decree is absolute and peremptory, and will never be revoked: I will surely do it to all this evil congregation, that are gathered
together against me;
against his ministers, Moses the chief magistrate, and Aaron the high priest; and this is interpreted gathering, conspiring, and rebelling against the Lord himself, on account of which they might be truly called an evil congregation, and therefore it was a determined point with him to destroy them: in this wilderness they shall be consumed;
by wasting diseases: and there they shall die;
as they wished they might, ( Numbers 14:22 ) ; with respect to which this was so often repeated, ( Exodus 16:3 ) ; and which the Jews interpret not only of a corporeal death, but of an eternal one; for they say ^F3

``the generation of the wilderness (of those that died there) have no part in the world to come, nor shall stand in judgment, as it is said, "in this wilderness" ( Numbers 14:35 ) .''

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FOOTNOTES:

F3 Misn. Sanhedrin, c. 11. sect. 3.

Numbers 14:35 In-Context

33 'Your sons shall be shepherds for forty years in the wilderness, and they will suffer for your unfaithfulness, until your corpses lie in the wilderness.

34 'According to the number of days which you spied out the land, forty days, for every day you shall bear your guilt a year, even forty years, and you will know My opposition.

35 'I, the LORD , have spoken, surely this I will do to all this evil congregation who are gathered together against Me. In this wilderness they shall be destroyed, and there they will die.' "

36 As for the men whom Moses sent to spy out the land and who returned and made all the congregation grumble against him by bringing out a bad report concerning the land,

37 even those men who brought out the very bad report of the land died by a plague before the LORD .

Cross References

• 1. Numbers 23:19