Numbers 13:23-27
They bare it between two upon a staff
The cluster from Eshcol needs two men to carry it, and the first half of the report agrees with the promise exactly.
Places of the Bible
Kadesh-barnea
Eleven days from the mountain to the border, and thirty-eight years from the border to anywhere.
Deuteronomy opens by measuring the distance: there are eleven days journey from Horeb by the way of mount Seir unto Kadesh-barnea. The sentence is doing arithmetic on a wasted generation. This is the edge of the land, the place where the people are close enough to send men in and look, and the whole book of Numbers turns on what they do when the twelve come back carrying grapes that take two men to lift.
Scroll down to the storyThe movements, in the order the text gives them.
The story of Kadesh-barnea
- 01
- 02
Numbers 13:31-33
We were in our own sight as grasshoppers
The turn is one word, nevertheless. What follows is an estimate of themselves offered as an observation about giants.
- 03
Numbers 14:6-9
Their defence is departed from them
Joshua and Caleb rend their clothes and argue the same facts to the opposite conclusion. The congregation proposes stoning them.
- 04
Numbers 14:26-35
Your carcases shall fall in this wilderness
The sentence is a year for a day, forty years for the forty days of searching, and it is addressed to everyone numbered from twenty upward.
- 05
Numbers 20:1-13
Speak ye unto the rock
They come back to the same place decades later. Miriam is buried here, the water fails, and Moses strikes what he was told to address.
Why it matters
The report is not a lie. It is a land flowing with milk and honey, and the people are strong and the cities walled and very great. Ten men add a conclusion, we be not able, and one sentence about how they saw themselves: we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight. That is a statement about a view from the inside presented as a fact about somebody else. The verdict is that this generation will not enter, and the place where they refused becomes the place they stay, for thirty-eight years, until Miriam dies there and Moses strikes the rock.
4 songs
The music
Every song in the catalogue whose passage falls inside these chapters.
