Bilangan 13:2

13:2 “Send out men to investigate ¹  the land of Canaan, which I am giving ²  to the Israelites. You are to send one man from each ancestral tribe, ³  each one a leader among them.”

Bilangan 13:16-17

13:16 These are the names of the men whom Moses sent to investigate the land. And Moses gave Hoshea son of Nun the name Joshua. ⁴ 

The Spies’ Instructions

13:17 When Moses sent ⁵  them to investigate the land of Canaan, he told them, “Go up through the Negev, ⁶  and then go up into the hill country

Bilangan 13:21

The Spies’ Activities

13:21 So they went up and investigated the land from the wilderness of Zin to Rehob, ⁷  at the entrance of Hamath. ⁸ 

Bilangan 13:25

13:25 They returned from investigating the land after forty days.

Bilangan 13:32

13:32 Then they presented the Israelites with a discouraging ⁹  report of the land they had investigated, saying, “The land that we passed through ¹⁰  to investigate is a land that devours ¹¹  its inhabitants. ¹²  All the people we saw there ¹³  are of great stature.

[13:2]  ¹ tn The imperfect tense with the conjunction is here subordinated to the preceding imperative to form the purpose clause. It can thus be translated “send…to investigate.”

[13:2]  ² tn The participle here should be given a future interpretation, meaning “which I am about to give” or “which I am going to give.”

[13:2]  ³ tn Heb “one man one man of the tribe of his fathers.”

[13:16]  ⁴ sn The difference in the names is slight, a change from “he saves” to “the Lord saves.” The Greek text of the OT used Iesoun for Hebrew Yeshua.

[13:17]  ⁵ tn The preterite with vav (ו) consecutive is here subordinated to the next verb of the same formation to express a temporal clause.

[13:17]  ⁶ tn The instructions had them first go up into the southern desert of the land, and after passing through that, into the hill country of the Canaanites. The text could be rendered “into the Negev” as well as “through the Negev.”

[13:21]  ⁷ sn Zin is on the southern edge of the land, but Rehob is far north, near Mount Hermon. The spies covered all the land.

[13:21]  ⁸ tn The idiom uses the infinitive construct: “to enter Hamath,” meaning, “on the way that people go to Hamath.”

[13:32]  ⁹ tn Or “an evil report,” i.e., one that was a defamation of the grace of God.

[13:32]  ¹⁰ 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.

[13:32]  ¹¹ 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.

[13:32]  ¹² 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.

[13:32]  ¹³ tn Heb “in its midst.”