1And the LORD spoke to Moses, saying, 2“Send you men, that they scout the land of Canaan which I am about to give to the Israelites, one man each for his father’s tribe, every one of them a chieftain.” 3And Moses sent them from the Wilderness of Paran by the LORD’s word, all of them men, heads of the Israelites they were. 4And these are their names: For the tribe of Reuben, Shammua the son of Zaccur. 5For the tribe of Simeon, Shaphat the son of Hori. 6For the tribe of Judah, Caleb son of Jephunneh. 7For the tribe of Issachar, Igal the son of Joseph. 8For the tribe of Ephraim, Hosea son of Nun. 9For the tribe of Benjamin, Palti son of Raphu. 10For the tribe of Zebulun, Gaddiel son of Sodi. 11For the tribe of Joseph, the tribe of Manassah, Gaddi son of Susi. 12For the tribe of Dan, Ammiel son of Gemalli. 13For the tribe of Asher, Sethur son of Michael. 14For the tribe of Naphtali, Nahbi son of Vophsi. 15For the tribe of Gad, Geuel son of Machi. 16These are the names of the men whom Moses sent to scout the land. And Moses called Hosea the son of Nun Joshua. 17And Moses sent them to scout the land of Canaan, and he said to them, “Go up this way through the Negeb, and you shall go up into the high country. 18And you shall see the land, what is it like, and the people that dwells in it, are they strong or slack, are they few or many. 19And what is the land in which they dwell, is it good or bad, and what are the towns in which they dwell, are they in open settlements or in fortresses. 20And what is the land, is it fat or lean, are there trees in it or not. And you shall muster strength and take of the fruit of the land.” And the season was the season of the first ripe grapes.
21And they went up and scouted the land from the Wilderness of Zin to Rehob at Lebo-Hamath. 22And they went up through the Negeb and came to Hebron, and there were Ahiman, Sheshai, and Talmai, offspring of the giant. And Hebron had been built seven years before Zoan in Egypt. 23And they came to Wadi Eshcol, and they cut off from there a branch and one cluster of grapes—and bore it on a pole with two men—and of the pomegranates and of the dates. 24That place was called Wadi Eshcol because of the cluster that the Israelites cut off there. 25And they came back from scouting the land at the end of forty days. 26And they went and came to Moses and to Aaron and to all the community of Israelites, at the Wilderness of Paran at Kadesh, and they brought back word to them and to all the community, and showed them the fruit of the land. 27And they recounted to him and said, “We came into the land to which you sent us, and it’s actually flowing with milk and honey, and this is its fruit. 28But mighty is the people that dwells in the land, and the towns are fortified and very big, and also the offspring of the giant we saw there. 29Amalek dwells in the Negeb land, and the Hittite and the Jebusite and the Amorite dwell in the high country, and the Canaanite dwells by the sea and by the Jordan.” 30And Caleb silenced the people around Moses and said, “We will surely go up and take hold of it, for we will surely prevail over it.” 31But the men who had gone up with him said, “We cannot go up against the people for they are stronger than we.” 32And they put forth an ill report to the Israelites of the land that they had scouted, saying, “The land through which we passed to scout is a land that consumes those who dwell in it, and all the people whom we saw in it are men of huge measure. 33And there did we see the Nephilim, sons of the giant from the Nephilim, and we were in our own eyes like grasshoppers, and so we were in their eyes.”
CHAPTER 13 NOTES
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3. all of them men. Rashi, followed by several modern commentators, proposes that “men” has the connotation of men of stature. In the present context, that might mean military prowess—a trait that would make the fearful majority report of the scouts all the more shameful.
4. And these are their names. These names are entirely different from the names of the tribal chieftains previously reported. Most of the names, moreover, do not appear elsewhere in the Bible. This could be an authentic ancient list of tribal military leaders, distinct from the tribal political heads.
16. And Moses called Hosea the son of Nun Joshua. The names are phonetically closer in the Hebrew—Hosheʿa and Yehoshuʿa. The latter is the variant of the former that bears the theophoric prefix, with the meaning “God-saves.”
17. and you shall go up into the high country. After crossing the Negeb desert, the tribes would move into the mountainous region of Judah in eastern Canaan.
18. are they strong or slack. The formulation of the mission of the scouts in terms of these binary opposites leads into the divided opinion of the report. The majority of ten will focus on “strong” and “fortifications.”
19. in open settlements. The Hebrew is literally “encampments.” This nomad’s term was evidently extended to any settlement lacking fortified walls. Given the fact that Canaan comprised a variety of city-states and regional mini-kingdoms which were often in conflict with one another, the landscape abounded in fortified cities.
20. muster strength and take of the fruit of the land. The notion that strength is required to take a sample of the fruit of the land is the first hint that the fruit is preternaturally heavy, just as the inhabitants are preternaturally large. The hyperbolic—or legendary—indication in verse 23 is that a single cluster of grapes is so heavy that it requires two men to carry it.
22. offspring of the giant. The second Hebrew term here, ʿanaq, is understood by some modern translators to be an ethnic designation (“Anakites”). The words of the scouts, however, in verse 33, clearly place “offspring of the ʿanaq” in apposition with Nephilim, the legendary man-god hybrids mentioned in Genesis 6:1–4, and there is no indication elsewhere of an ethnic group called Anakites. (On the basis of this chapter, ʿanaq in all subsequent strata of Hebrew is the standard term for “giant.”) The legendary scale of the bounty of the land, its “fatness,” is matched by the legendary proportions of its inhabitants. It should be noted that this representation of Hebron inhabited by giants swerves from the depiction of Hebron in Genesis 25, where the local denizens are ordinary, and commercially shrewd, Hittites.
Zoan in Egypt. This city is usually identified as Tanis.
24. Wadi Eshcol. “Eshcol” is the Hebrew term for “grape cluster.”
25. at the end of forty days. The number is of course formulaic, but it is also a reasonably plausible time in which a contingent of men on foot might traverse the Negeb, from its southernmost region (the Wilderness of Paran), make their way to northern Canaan, and return.
27. they recounted to him. Although Aaron and the representatives of the community are present, and have been shown the spectacular samples of the fruit of the land, it is to Moses as leader that they address the words of their report.
it’s actually flowing with milk and honey. Moses, conveying the divine promise, has repeatedly used this phrase for the fruitfulness of the land. Now the eyewitnesses confirm that it is actually (gam) true.
29. the Canaanite dwells by the sea. This indication is historically accurate for the thirteenth century B.C.E. because the Philistines, who would very soon control most of the coastal area, had not yet arrived.
30. We will surely go up . . . we will surely prevail. Caleb’s vehement contradiction of the majority of the scouts does not deny the substance of their report but rather insists that even against such huge adversaries and such an array of fortified cities the Israelites will prevail. This martial resolution will be fulfilled in the biblical account a full generation later, under Joshua’s leadership.
32. a land that consumes those who dwell in it. As several medieval commentators observe, the scouts now raise the ante in their negative report. At first, they duly noted the extravagant fruitfulness of the land together with the fearful aspect of its inhabitants. Now, in their rejoinder to Caleb, they put forth an ill report (dibah) of the land itself, saying that it consumes its inhabitants. Jacob Milgrom plausibly proposes that this phrase refers to a state of repeated war in which the inhabitants of this land find themselves, at the geographical crossroads between the Near Eastern empires to the south, to the east, and to the north. The multiple ethnic groups, moreover, of the land itself, indicated in the scouts’ report, reflect armed conflict among the various natives. The land flowing with milk and honey, then, is seen in these words as a kind of death trap: even if the Israelites were to succeed in obtaining a foothold and themselves became dwellers of the land, it would “consume” them through internecine and international warfare.
men of huge measure. “Huge” is merely implied in the Hebrew.
33. and so we were in their eyes. This judgment has to be sheer fearful projection, for they would scarcely have spoken with the Canaanites.