Peter Pett's Commentary on the Bible
Numbers 13:26-1
3). The Scouts Report Back (Numbers 13:26 to Numbers 14:1).
Once the scouts arrived back they immediately reported to Moses. What resulted can be summarised as follows:
a The scouts report back to Moses, Aaron and ‘all the congregation' (Numbers 13:26)
b The scouts describe the land and the awesome sons of Anak (Numbers 13:27).
c Caleb stills the people (Numbers 13:30 a)
c Caleb says, ‘let us go forward' (Numbers 13:30 b).
b The scouts report evil of the land and the awesome sons of Anak (Numbers 13:31).
a ‘All the congregation' lift up their voice and cry and weep (Numbers 14:1).
‘And they went and came to Moses, and to Aaron, and to all the congregation of the children of Israel, to the wilderness of Paran, to Kadesh, and brought back word to them, and to all the congregation, and showed them the fruit of the land.'
The scouts returned to Kadesh in the wilderness of Paran to Moses and Aaron in order to report, but note the stress on the fact that they also reported to ‘all the congregation'. They brought word of what they had done and seen, and produced the fruit of the land for inspection. This brings out that the spying was not just military, otherwise the reports could have been restricted to Moses, Aaron and the officers. It was in order to face the whole people up with the decision whether to go forward or not.
As Moses' representative Joshua would immediately have rejoined Moses, who would no doubt have been awaiting his special report. He probably felt that there was no need for him to accompany the other eleven, feeling it better that the people should hear the report from independent witnesses and not from one whom they would see as one of Moses' cronies. He would be standing with Moses and Aaron to hear the report of the other eleven to the people.
‘And they told him, and said, “We came to the land to which you sent us, and surely it flows with milk and honey, and this is its fruit.” '
First came the positive news. They had inspected the land and it really was a land flowing with milk and honey, and to prove it they produced its fruit. The promise of a land flowing with milk and honey was central to Israel's expectations. The very words should have awakened faith. This was what Yahweh had promised them! And it was there for the taking. See Exodus 3:8; Exodus 3:17; Exodus 13:5; Exodus 33:3; Leviticus 20:24.
“ However the people who dwell in the land are strong, and the cities are fortified, and very great, and moreover we saw the children of Anak there.”
But then came the downside. The people in the land were strong, and their cities were well fortified, and very large. But what was even worse, the sons of Anak were there, the dreaded Anakim. It was probably the last that made the most impact. Superstitious dread accompanied talk about the Anakim. This was the language of unbelief.
“ Amalek dwells in the land of the South, and the Hittite, and the Jebusite, and the Amorite, dwell in the hill-country, and the Canaanite dwell by the sea, and along by the side of the Jordan.'
They then described the spread of the different enemies in more depth. Amalek dwelt in the Negeb; the Hittites (around Hebron), the Jebusites (around Jerusalem) and Amorites (spread across the hills) dwelt in the hill country; and the Canaanites dwelt by the sea in the Coastal Plain and along by the side of the Jordan. That should have been some encouragement. At least the enemy were divided up and therefore more vulnerable. They would not have to fight them all at once. But the hearers simply saw them as indicating an unexpectedly difficult problem. It was a good deal more than they had expected. They were being faced up with what lay before them.
‘And Caleb stilled the people before Moses, and said, “Let us go up at once, and possess it, for we are well able to overcome it.” '
But Caleb saw the situation clearly. He firstly sought to quieten their fears. Then he urged that they immediately mobilise and enter the land in order to conquer it, for he was confident that they could take possession of it and overcome those who would oppose them. His eyes were on Yahweh and the fruitfulness of the land. He had no doubt that with Yahweh with them they would have no difficulty in possessing it.
Joshua, standing with Moses, said nothing. He had not only gone as a tribal chieftain, but as Moses' representative. On returning he would have taken his place with Moses, and all knew that he would do whatever Moses said. Thus he wisely kept out of the discussions. The arguing was therefore left to Caleb, who would later turn out to be such a powerful chieftain by defeating the selfsame Anakim (Joshua 15:13). The people would recognise that he was unbiased. This mention of only Caleb actually authenticates the narrative.
‘But the men who went up with him said, “We are not able to go up against the people, for they are stronger than we.”
However, the men who had gone with him took the opposite view. They claimed that they could not possibly go up against these people, because they were stronger than the Israelites. Their eyes were fixed firmly on the Anakim.
‘And they brought up an evil report of the land which they had spied out to the children of Israel, saying, “The land, through which we have gone to spy it out, is a land that eats up its inhabitants, and all the people that we saw in it are men of great stature. And there we saw the Nephilim, the sons of Anak, who come of the Nephilim, and we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight.” '
The result was that their report was totally discouraging. Indeed it was falsified. They gave an ‘evil report' about the land. They said that it was a land which ‘ate up its inhabitants'. That signified that living conditions were difficult, and a living hard to come by (see Leviticus 26:38; Ezekiel 36:13). They were arguing that it was not a good land to live in. They were deliberately putting the people off. This contradicted their previous comment about its fruitfulness. Different spies would, of course, have seen different terrain, but whether they saw fruit or whether they saw barrenness would depend on what they looked at.
The truth was that they were put off because they were awed as a result of the height of some of the inhabitants. Those, they said, were men of great stature, and they included the dreaded Anakim, who it was rumoured were some of the Nephilim. The latter name referred to the superstitions of the time. The Nephilim were thought of as god-like men who had lived in the time of the ancients, as referred to in Genesis 6:4. Anyone of unusual size could expect to be linked with the Nephilim. This was enough to frighten everyone. So while on the one hand Caleb looked at Yahweh, the Almighty, the other scouts, and the people looked at the Nephilim. Whom we look at very often determines what we are and what we do.
Note the deliberate exaggeration which could only produce fear. ‘Compared with them we saw ourselves as grasshoppers, tiny and insignificant, and they looked on us as the same, to be dismissed or trodden on at will.' What hope could there be against such people? In fact as Deuteronomy points out such people had been defeated by both the Moabites (Deuteronomy 2:10) and the Ammonites (Deuteronomy 2:20), and could be by the Israelites. The gross exaggeration both as regards the goodness of the land and as regards its inhabitants came from craven fear. If the leaders were not able to have trust in Yahweh, what hope was there for their people?
‘And all the congregation lifted up their voice, and cried, and the people wept that night.'
The people were devastated. They felt as though their dream had collapsed, as indeed it had. They lifted up their voice and cried, and they wept all night. This was exactly what they had done when there was a shortage of delicacies (Numbers 11:10). It was a sign of how pent up they were, and how much they were a slave to their emotional state. They were clearly in no state to engage in a large scale invasion. It would have done them no favours to allow them to enter the land in that condition. The only hope all along had been that their trust in Yahweh would have enabled them to overcome their servile fears, but because their faith was lacking it had not happened. And now they were caught short. In the end all resulted from a lack of faith. Had they trusted God their weakness would have been made strong.