Bilangan 11:18

11:18 “And say to the people, ‘Sanctify yourselves ¹  for tomorrow, and you will eat meat, for you have wept in the hearing ²  of the Lord, saying, “Who will give us meat to eat, ³  for life ⁴  was good for us in Egypt?” Therefore the Lord will give you meat, and you will eat.

Bilangan 13:32

13:32 Then they presented the Israelites with a discouraging ⁵  report of the land they had investigated, saying, “The land that we passed through ⁶  to investigate is a land that devours ⁷  its inhabitants. ⁸  All the people we saw there ⁹  are of great stature.

Bilangan 14:14

14:14 then they will tell it to the inhabitants ¹⁰  of this land. They have heard that you, Lord, are among this people, that you, Lord, are seen face to face, ¹¹  that your cloud stands over them, and that you go before them by day in a pillar of cloud and in a pillar of fire by night.

¹ tn The Hitpael is used to stress that they are to prepare for a holy appearance. The day was going to be special and so required their being set apart for it. But it is a holy day in the sense of the judgment that was to follow.

² tn Heb “in the ears.”

³ tn Possibly this could be given an optative translation, to reflect the earlier one: “O that someone would give….” But the verb is not the same; here it is the Hiphil of the verb “to eat” – “who will make us eat” (i.e., provide meat for us to eat).

⁴ tn The word “life” is not in the text. The expression is simply “it was for us,” or “we had good,” meaning “we had it good,” or “life was good.”

⁵ tn Or “an evil report,” i.e., one that was a defamation of the grace of God.

⁶ tn 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.

⁷ tn 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.

⁸ sn 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.

⁹ tn Heb “in its midst.”

¹⁰ tn The singular participle is to be taken here as a collective, representing all the inhabitants of the land.

¹¹ tn “Face to face” is literally “eye to eye.” It only occurs elsewhere in Isa 52:8. This expresses the closest communication possible.