Numbers 13:25-33
We are well able
The report is forty days old and the cluster of grapes takes two men to carry. Caleb quiets the people and says go up at once. The other ten answer that the land eats its inhabitants.
People of the Bible
Caleb
Waited forty-five years to collect on one sentence, and asked for the hardest piece of ground on the map.
Caleb is one of twelve men sent to look at the land, and one of two who came back saying the same land could be taken. He is the one who quiets the crowd and says let us go up at once, and for that he spends the next four decades walking in circles with a generation that decided otherwise. He is eighty-five when the allotment comes. Instead of choosing something level and already cleared, he asks for the hill country where the giants and the fortified cities are, and says he is as strong now as the day Moses sent him.
Scroll down to the story
The movements, in the order the text gives them.
The story of Caleb
- 01
- 02
Numbers 14:20-24
Another spirit
The sentence falls: nobody over twenty enters. Caleb is named as the exception, for a reason the text gives plainly, that he followed fully.
- 03
Deuteronomy 1:34-36
The one exception, repeated
Forty years later Moses retells it to the children of the people who refused, and names Caleb again. The land he walked on will be his and his children’s.
- 04
Joshua 14:6-15
Give me this mountain
At eighty-five he comes to Joshua with the promise and asks for the highlands with the Anakim in them. He drives them out, and the town that had been called the city of Arba becomes Hebron.
Why it matters
Caleb is the answer the spy story needed. Ten reports were accurate about the walls and wrong about what the walls meant, and Scripture keeps saying that Caleb had another spirit and followed fully. He is not an Israelite by descent, he is called a Kenizzite, which makes the one man who fully believed the promise about the land an outsider by blood. Hebron becomes his, and it is where Abraham and Sarah are buried.
3 songs
The music
Every song in the catalogue whose passage falls inside these chapters.
