Nicolas Poussin, The Israelites Gathering the Manna in the Desert, 1637-1639. Public domain.
Numbers 14, Psalm 95 and Hebrews 3 and 4 · Story · Featured Study
The Wilderness Generation
The generation that left Egypt died in the wilderness, and Psalm 95, Hebrews 3 and 4 and 1 Corinthians 10 read their end as a warning.
The people who had watched the sea part and eaten bread from heaven every morning stood at the border and refused to trust the God who fed them.
Now these things happened to them as examples and were written down as warnings for us, on whom the fulfillment of the ages has come. So the one who thinks he is standing firm should be careful not to fall. No temptation has seized you except what is common to man. And God is faithful; He will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, He will also provide an escape, so that you can stand up under it.
- Where
- Kadesh-Barnea, Gilgal, Moab, Mount Nebo
- Who
- Moses, Aaron, Caleb, Joshua, Korah
- When
- the forty years from the exodus to the plains of Moab
The people who had watched the sea part and eaten bread from heaven every morning stood at the border and refused to trust the God who fed them.
Summary
The LORD's oath at Kadesh spared only Caleb and Joshua of the men counted at twenty and over.
- Forty days of spying became forty years in the wilderness.
- The march from Kadesh-barnea to the Brook of Zered took thirty-eight years, and by its end the whole generation of fighting men had died.
- Psalm 95, given through David long after, calls its hearers to hear God's voice today.
- Paul writes that these things were written down for those on whom the fulfillment of the ages has come.
- Moses himself died on Mount Nebo at one hundred and twenty, outside the land.
Kadesh-Barnea, Where the Sentence Fell
Numbers 14, from the refusal to the oath
At Kadesh-barnea, on the very edge of the promise, the people weep through the night and talk of choosing a leader to take them back to Egypt. They speak of stoning Caleb and Joshua (Numbers 14:1 to 10).
The LORD names the charge as unbelief (Numbers 14:11). Moses intercedes here as he had at the golden calf, the office that saves the nation from itself (Numbers 14:13 to 19).
The LORD pardons at Moses' word and swears an oath in the same reply (Numbers 14:20 to 23).
The sentence is forty years (Numbers 14:33 to 34). The next morning the people go up against the LORD's word, and the Amalekites and Canaanites drive them back as far as Hormah (Numbers 14:40 to 45).
Numbers 14 in the Berean text, with John Wesley on the ten timesNumbers 14:11, Numbers 14:20 to 23, Numbers 14:29 to 31 and Numbers 14:33 to 34
Caleb had already quieted the people and urged them to go up at once (Numbers 13:30). Joshua and Caleb tore their clothes and pleaded that the LORD, if He was pleased with them, would bring them into the land (Numbers 14:6 to 9).
And the LORD said to Moses, “How long will this people treat Me with contempt? How long will they refuse to believe in Me, despite all the signs I have performed among them?Hebrews 3:19 gives the same cause for the failure to enter: unbelief.
“I have pardoned them as you requested,” the LORD replied. “Yet as surely as I live and as surely as the whole earth is filled with the glory of the LORD, not one of the men who have seen My glory and the signs I performed in Egypt and in the wilderness—yet have tested Me and disobeyed Me these ten times— not one will ever see the land that I swore to give their fathers. None of those who have treated Me with contempt will see it.John Wesley, in his Explanatory Notes upon the Old Testament, reads the ten times of Numbers 14:22 as a way of saying many times.
Your bodies will fall in this wilderness—all who were numbered in the census, everyone twenty years of age or older—because you have grumbled against Me. Surely none of you will enter the land in which I swore to settle you, except Caleb son of Jephunneh and Joshua son of Nun. But I will bring your children, whom you said would become plunder, into the land you have rejected—and they will enjoy it.Joshua 14:6 to 10 records the exception kept: Caleb, at eighty-five, claims the land promised him at Kadesh.
Your children will be shepherds in the wilderness for forty years, and they will suffer for your unfaithfulness until the last of your bodies lies in the wilderness. In keeping with the forty days you spied out the land, you shall bear your guilt forty years—a year for each day—and you will experience My alienation.The Hebrew words behind the refusalnasah and aman in Numbers 14
The verb nasah, to test, stands in Numbers 14:22, and the verb aman, to trust or believe, in Numbers 14:11.
The Cycle
From the fire at Taberah to the death of Moses
Nine numbered cards give the stops in order, each with what happened there and its verse.
- TaberahThe people complain, and fire burns the outskirts of the campNumbers 11:1 to 3
- The graves of cravingThe craving for meat brings quail and then a plague, and the place is named for the gravesNumbers 11:31 to 34
- Kadesh-barneaTen spies bring a bad report, and the people refuse to go upNumbers 14:1 to 35
- Korah's revoltKorah and his company challenge Moses and Aaron, and the ground opens beneath themNumbers 16:1 to 35
- Meribah at KadeshMoses strikes the rock he was told to speak toNumbers 20:1 to 13
- The bronze serpentBitten by snakes after speaking against God and Moses, the people look at the bronze serpent and liveNumbers 21:4 to 9
- Baal-PeorIsrael joins in the worship of Moab's god, and twenty-four thousand die in the plagueNumbers 25:1 to 9
- The second censusThe land is to be divided among the tribes by the new countNumbers 26:52 to 56
- Mount NeboMoses sees the land from the mountain and dies in MoabDeuteronomy 34:1 to 5
Baal-Peor, The second census, Mount Nebo
The repetition is itself the point: the same unbelief recurs until an entire generation is spent. Through every stop God keeps faith with a people who fail Him, and the promise passes to their children.
The LORD's own question at Kadesh names the whole cycle. He asks how long this wicked congregation will grumble against Him (Numbers 14:27).
Gustave Doré, The Spies Return from the Promised Land, 1866. Public domain.
Doré draws the spies coming back from the Valley of Eshcol with a cluster of grapes carried on a pole between two men (Numbers 13:23). The camp that sees the fruit is the camp that refuses the land.
Gustave Doré, The Bronze Serpent, 1866. Public domain.
Doré draws Moses pointing to the serpent on its pole while the bitten lie across the ground and others strain up to look (Numbers 21:8 to 9). The stop came in the fortieth year, after Aaron's death on Mount Hor (Numbers 20:28 and Numbers 33:38).
Thirty-Eight Years, From Kadesh to the Zered
How the first generation died out, in the order the text gives
The forty years of the sentence count from the exodus. Israel left Sinai in the second year (Numbers 10:11 to 12), and the march from Kadesh to the Zered took up the rest (Deuteronomy 2:14).
The second census on the plains of Moab checks the oath of Numbers 14 man by man (Numbers 26:63 to 65).
Moses and Aaron were barred from the land at Meribah because they did not trust the LORD to show Himself holy before the people (Numbers 20:12).
When the new generation is circumcised at Gilgal, Joshua names disobedience as the cause of the deaths (Joshua 5:6).
The thirty-eight years in the Berean textDeuteronomy 2:14 to 16, Deuteronomy 8:2 and Deuteronomy 34:4 to 7, Numbers 26:63 to 65 and Joshua 5:6
The time we spent traveling from Kadesh-barnea until we crossed over the Brook of Zered was thirty-eight years, until that entire generation of fighting men had perished from the camp, as the LORD had sworn to them. Indeed, the LORD’s hand was against them, to eliminate them from the camp, until they had all perished. Now when all the fighting men among the people had died,These were the ones numbered by Moses and Eleazar the priest when they counted the Israelites on the plains of Moab by the Jordan, across from Jericho. Among all these, however, there was not one who had been numbered by Moses and Aaron the priest when they counted the Israelites in the Wilderness of Sinai. For the LORD had told them that they would surely die in the wilderness. Not one was left except Caleb son of Jephunneh and Joshua son of Nun.Remember that these forty years the LORD your God led you all the way in the wilderness, so that He might humble you and test you in order to know what was in your heart, whether or not you would keep His commandments.Moses tells the new generation what the forty years were for.
And the LORD said to him, “This is the land that I swore to give Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob when I said, ‘I will give it to your descendants.’ I have let you see it with your own eyes, but you will not cross into it.” So Moses the servant of the LORD died there in the land of Moab, as the LORD had said. And He buried him in a valley in the land of Moab facing Beth-peor, and no one to this day knows the location of his grave. Moses was a hundred and twenty years old when he died, yet his eyes were not weak, and his vitality had not diminished.For the Israelites had wandered in the wilderness forty years, until all the nation’s men of war who had come out of Egypt had died, since they did not obey the LORD. So the LORD vowed never to let them see the land He had sworn to their fathers to give us, a land flowing with milk and honey.“Common providence, we may observe, in about thirty-eight years, ordinarily raises a new generation, so that in that time few remain of the old one; but here it was entirely new, and none at all remained but Caleb and Joshua: for indeed the hand of the Lord was against them,”
Matthew Henry · Commentary on the Whole Bible · on Deuteronomy 2:14Puritan
Two Points the Text Settles
Psalm 95's Meribah and the pardon of Numbers 14, each with its reference
TWO PLACES NAMED MERIBAH
Psalm 95 pairs Meribah with Massah, the two names given at the rock in Exodus 17:7. Numbers 20:13 names a second Meribah at Kadesh, so the psalm looks back to the first.
THE PARDON STOOD
The pardon spared the nation the destruction the LORD named in Numbers 14:12; the sentence that followed fell on one generation of men, and the nation lived to enter.
The World Behind the Forty Years
Kadesh, the camps and the bread
The text places Kadesh in the Wilderness of Paran and in the Wilderness of Zin, south of the land the spies explored (Numbers 13:26 and Numbers 20:1). Numbers 33 lists the camps of the whole journey from Egypt to the plains of Moab, station by station.
The camp lived on manna for the whole forty years, until it came to the border of Canaan (Exodus 16:35). The manna stopped the day after the people ate the produce of the land at Gilgal (Joshua 5:12).
What the Text Leaves Unsaid
Five places where the account stops
Scripture gives no verdict on whether any of the first generation was eternally lost. It counts no deaths year by year, and it tells almost nothing of what happened at the camps of those years.
It names no second strike of the rock as the reason Moses was kept out of the land. It fixes no site for Kadesh on a map.
The Standing Warning: 1 Corinthians 10 and Hebrews 3 and 4
Where the New Testament applies the forty years to the church
Paul reads the craving of Numbers 11, and the idolatry at Baal-Peor and the plague that followed, as examples (1 Corinthians 10:6 to 8). All the fathers passed through the sea and ate the same spiritual food, and still God was displeased with most of them (1 Corinthians 10:1 to 5).
The Greek word is typos, a stamp struck by a die and so a shape or pattern (1 Corinthians 10:6).
Now these things happened to them as examples and were written down as warnings for us, on whom the fulfillment of the ages has come. So the one who thinks he is standing firm should be careful not to fall. No temptation has seized you except what is common to man. And God is faithful; He will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, He will also provide an escape, so that you can stand up under it.Here Paul draws the lesson of the examples in verses 1 to 10 for his readers at Corinth.
Psalm 95 sets the forty years and the oath of Numbers 14 before worshippers as a warning for their own day (Psalm 95:8 to 11).
Hebrews quotes the psalm at length (Hebrews 3:7 to 11) and argues that its Today, spoken after Joshua's day, shows that the rest still stood open (Hebrews 4:7 to 8).
Hebrews calls the rest katapausis, the word of Psalm 95, and then names it sabbatismos, a Sabbath rest, a word found only at Hebrews 4:9.
See to it, brothers, that none of you has a wicked heart of unbelief that turns away from the living God. But exhort one another daily, as long as it is called today, so that none of you may be hardened by sin’s deceitfulness.Psalm 95 and Hebrews 4 in the Berean text, with Jamieson, Fausset and Brown on the Sabbath restPsalm 95:8 to 11 and Hebrews 4:9 to 11
do not harden your hearts as you did at Meribah, in the day at Massah in the wilderness, where your fathers tested and tried Me, though they had seen My work. For forty years I was angry with that generation, and I said, “They are a people whose hearts go astray, and they have not known My ways.” So I swore on oath in My anger, “They shall never enter My rest.”There remains, then, a Sabbath rest for the people of God. For whoever enters God’s rest also rests from his own work, just as God did from His. Let us, therefore, make every effort to enter that rest, so that no one will fall by following the same pattern of disobedience.Behind katapausis stands the Hebrew menuchah of Psalm 95:11, a place of rest.
“This verse indirectly establishes the obligation of the Sabbath still; for the type continues until the antitype supersedes it: so legal sacrifices continued till the great antitypical Sacrifice superseded it, As then the antitypical heavenly Sabbath-rest will not be till Christ, our Gospel Joshua, comes, to usher us into it, the typical earthly Sabbath must continue till then.”
Jamieson, Fausset & Brown · Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible · on Hebrews 4:9Reformed
Four Voices on the Warning
Calvin, Wesley, Jamieson, Fausset and Brown, and Spurgeon, earliest first
1509 to 1564 · John Calvin
Commentaries
The quotation1 quotation
“It is such that faith is not to be separated from the word, and that the word separated from faith can confer no good; not indeed that the efficacy or power of the word depends on us; for were the whole world false, he who cannot lie would still never cease to be true, but the word never puts forth its power in us except when faith gives it an entrance.”
John Calvin · Commentaries · on Hebrews 4:2Reformed
1703 to 1791 · John Wesley
Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament
The quotation1 quotation
“But, to prevent it, exhort one another, while it is called Today - This today will not last forever. The day of life will end soon, and perhaps the day of grace yet sooner.”
John Wesley · Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament · on Hebrews 3:13Evangelical
1834 to 1892 · Charles Spurgeon
The Treasury of David, Vol. 4
The quotation1 quotation
“Harden not your heart. If ye will hear, learn to fear also. The sea and the land obey him, do not prove more obstinate than they! We cannot soften our hearts, but we can harden them, and the consequences will be fatal. Today is too good a day to be profaned by the hardening of our hearts against our own mercies. While mercy reigns let not obduracy rebel. ‘As in the provocations, and as in the day of temptation in the wilderness’ (or, ‘like Meribah, like the day of Massah in the wilderness’). Be not wilfully, wantonly, repeatedly, obstinately rebellious.”
Charles Spurgeon · The Treasury of David, Vol. 4 · on Psalm 95:8
1802 to 1910 · Jamieson, Fausset & Brown
Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible
The quotation1 quotation
“Answer to the objection which might be made to his reasoning, namely, that those brought into Canaan by Joshua (so ‘Jesus’ here means, as in Ac 7:45) did enter the rest of God.”
Jamieson, Fausset & Brown · Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible · on Hebrews 4:8Reformed
Charles Spurgeon, Jamieson, Fausset & Brown
Where Readers Differ
Five questions, each with its holders, a source and the strongest objection
Can a believer fall short of the rest?Wesleyan and Reformed, with Wesley on Hebrews 3:14 and Calvin on Hebrews 4:1
The Wesleyan reading, held by John Wesley, takes the condition of Hebrews 3:14 as real. Its strongest objection is Calvin's answer on Hebrews 4:1.
“For we are made partakers of Christ - And we shall still partake of him and all his benefits, if we hold fast our faith unto the end. If - But not else; and a supposition made by the Holy Ghost is equal to the, strongest assertion. Both the sentiment and the manner of expression are the same as ver. 6.”
John Wesley · Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament · on Hebrews 3:14Evangelical
The Reformed reading, held by John Calvin, rests on Hebrews 4:1. Its strongest objection is that Hebrews 3:12 addresses its warning to brothers.
“By saying Lest we be disappointed of the promise left us, he intimates that no one comes short of it except he who by rejecting grace has first renounced the promise; for God is so far from repenting to do us good that he ceases not to bestow his gifts except when we despise his calling.”
John Calvin · Commentaries · on Hebrews 4:1Reformed
How large was the host?The totals as written, and the family-unit reading of W. M. Flinders Petrie
Adam Clarke, in his Commentary on the Bible, takes the census totals as counts of men, 603,550 at Sinai and 601,730 on the plains of Moab (Numbers 1:46 and Numbers 26:51). Exodus 38:26 gives the same 603,550 for the men who paid the half shekel.
“All they that were numbered were six hundred thousand and three thousand and five hundred and fifty - What an astonishing increase from seventy souls that went down into Egypt, Gen 46:27, about 215 years before, where latterly they had endured the greatest hardships! But God’s promise cannot fail (Gen 16:5); and who can resist his will, and bring to naught his counsel?”
Adam Clarke · Commentary on the Bible · on Numbers 1:46Evangelical
W. M. Flinders Petrie, in Egypt and Israel (1911), noted that the Hebrew eleph means a thousand and also a family group. He read each tribe's thousands as tents and its hundreds as people, which gives about 5,550 people at the first count and 5,730 at the second.
The strongest objection to Petrie's reading is that Numbers 1:46 sums the columns into one total of 603,550, which treats them as thousands.
When was the exodus?The fifteenth century from 1 Kings 6:1, and the thirteenth from Raamses
Matthew Henry, in his Commentary on the Whole Bible, takes 1 Kings 6:1 as it stands. Petrie reckons that the count, taken from Solomon's fourth year, sets the exodus at 1453 BC.
“This gave it its beauty of holiness, that it was the house of the Lord, which far transcended all its other beauties. The time when it began to be built is exactly set down. It was just 480 years after the bringing of the children of Israel out of Egypt.”
Matthew Henry · Commentary on the Whole Bible · on 1 Kings 6:1Puritan
Petrie held a thirteenth-century date, about 1220 BC, because Exodus 1:11 names a store city called Raamses, which he took as pointing to the reign of Rameses II. He read the 480 years as a total compiled from the periods of Judges.
The strongest objection to the later date is the number of 1 Kings 6:1 itself, with Jephthah's three hundred years in Judges 11:26. The strongest objection to the earlier date is the name Raamses in Exodus 1:11.
What became of the generation?Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Eliezer in the Mishnah, Sanhedrin 10:3
The Mishnah, compiled about AD 190 to 230, records two of its teachers on this question. Rabbi Akiva held that the generation of the wilderness has no share in the world to come. He read the two verbs of Numbers 14:35, consumed and die, as this world and the world to come.
Rabbi Eliezer held that they were essentially righteous, and applied to them Psalm 50:5, which speaks of gathering God's faithful who made a covenant with Him by sacrifice. The objection each makes to the other is the verse the other sets aside.
Twenty-three thousand or twenty-four thousand?1 Corinthians 10:8 and Numbers 25:9, with John Wesley on Numbers 25:9
Paul counts twenty-three thousand who fell in one day (1 Corinthians 10:8), and Numbers counts twenty-four thousand who died in the plague (Numbers 25:9). John Wesley reconciles the two counts in his Explanatory Notes upon the Old Testament.
“Twenty four thousand - St. Paul says twenty three thousand, 1 Cor. x, 8. The odd thousand here added were slain by the Judges according to the order of Moses, the rest by the immediate hand of God, but both sorts died of the plague, the word being used, as often it is, for the sword, or hand, or stroke of God.”
John Wesley · Explanatory Notes upon the Old Testament · on Numbers 25:9Evangelical
Albert Barnes, in his Notes on the Old and New Testaments, explains the difference from Jewish tradition.
“Twenty and four thousand - Paul 1Co 10:8 says ‘three and twenty thousand,’ following probably the Jewish tradition which deducted one thousand as the number slain by the hands of their brethren.”
Albert Barnes · Notes, Explanatory and Practical, on the Old and New Testaments (1832-1869) · on Numbers 25:9Evangelical
The objection to each is that neither text names the method of its count.
Books to Read Next
Four works on the forty years and the warning
Commentaries on the Epistle to the Hebrews
John Calvin · 1549
Calvin works through Hebrews 3 and 4 verse by verse.
READ IT FREE AT CCEL →Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament
John Wesley · 1755
Wesley comments on Hebrews 3 and 4 in a few lines a verse.
READ IT FREE AT CCEL →The Treasury of David, volume 4
Charles Spurgeon · 1874
Spurgeon works through Psalm 95 verse by verse in his exposition.
READ IT FREE AT CCEL →Egypt and Israel
W. M. Flinders Petrie · 1911
Petrie works from the Egyptian evidence to the date of the exodus and the size of the host.
READ IT FREE AT THE INTERNET ARCHIVE →As Long as It Is Called Today
The rest is entered by believing, and Hebrews sets Jesus the Son of God before the reader as the great high priest who brings His people in (Hebrews 4:3 and Hebrews 4:14).
Sources
Scripture is the Berean Standard Bible.
- Strong's lexicon entries h5254, h539, h4496, g2663, g4520, g5179.
- John Calvin, Commentaries on the Epistle to the Hebrews (1549), translated by John Owen.
- John Wesley, Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament (1755)
- John Wesley, Explanatory Notes upon the Old Testament (1765)
- Robert Jamieson, A. R. Fausset and David Brown, Commentary Critical and Explanatory on the Whole Bible (1871)
- Charles Spurgeon, The Treasury of David, volume 4 (1874)
- Matthew Henry, Commentary on the Whole Bible (1710)
- Albert Barnes, Notes, Explanatory and Practical, on the Old and New Testaments (1832-1869)
- Adam Clarke, Commentary on the Bible (1832)
- W. M. Flinders Petrie, Egypt and Israel (London, 1911)
- Mishnah Sanhedrin 10:3, the William Davidson Edition, English (CC BY-NC)
- Gustave Doré, The Spies Return from the Promised Land (1866), public domain.
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