Numbers13chapter 13

Numbers 13:1-2

The order to send men comes from the LORD here, and Deuteronomy 1:22 records the people coming to Moses first with the proposal, ye shall search us out the land. Both accounts stand in the canon, and Adam Clarke reads them together, taking the command in verse 2 as God granting what the people had already asked for. Every man sent is a ruler in his own tribe, so the report will carry the weight of the men who bring it.

Numbers 13:3-4

They set out from the wilderness of Paran, and the twelve are heads of the children of Israel, men who already held rule among their people. Calvin says the names are written down in perpetual remembrance, since ten of the twelve are recorded here only to be condemned by what they say at verse 31. The list begins with Shammua of Reuben, which is birth order, though Numbers 2:3 had put Judah at the head of the camp and Numbers 7:12 had given Judah the first day.

Numbers 13:5-10

The tribal order in this roll matches neither the camp of Numbers 2 nor the census list of Numbers 1, since Zebulun stands seventh here and fifth there. Caleb is named at verse 6 and Oshea at verse 8 with nothing to mark either of them out from the ten around them. Matthew Henry suggests the whole roll is preserved for the sake of the two good men in it, since the other ten are never named again after this chapter.

Numbers 13:11-15

Levi is absent from the twelve and Joseph is divided into Ephraim at verse 8 and Manasseh here, which holds the number at twelve by the same device the census used at Numbers 1:10. Adam Clarke observes that the Hebrew letters of Sethur at verse 13 add to six hundred and sixty six, and then dismisses his own observation as useless to either history or theology. The roll closes with Gad, and the very next verse changes one of the names in it.

Numbers 13:16

Moses changes Oshea to Jehoshua, setting a letter of the divine name in front of a word meaning salvation, so a prayer to be saved becomes a statement that he will save. Matthew Henry puts it as a prayer turned into a promise. Exodus 17:9 and Exodus 24:13 already call him Joshua, which means the narrative uses the new name before it records the giving of it, and Clarke names that difficulty rather than smoothing it over. Jehoshua is the name the Greek New Testament carries as Jesus, and the King James prints Jesus for Joshua at Acts 7:45 and Hebrews 4:8.

Numbers 13:17-20

The brief is a set of questions about the country and the people in it, strong or weak, few or many, good or bad, walled cities or tents, fat land or lean. Every one of those questions is answered accurately at verses 27 to 29, and the quarrel at verse 31 is over what the answers mean. Moses adds be ye of good courage and asks for fruit, and the writer dates the errand to the time of the firstripe grapes, which Jamieson, Fausset and Brown place in August.

Numbers 13:21-22

They cover the whole country, from the wilderness of Zin in the south to Rehob near the approach to Hamath in the far north, so the search reached well beyond the border they would have had to cross first. At Hebron they meet three men named in the text, Ahiman, Sheshai and Talmai, the children of Anak. Joshua 15:13-14 records Caleb driving out those same three by name and Judges 1:10 records the same fight again, so one of the two men who kept faith here finished that business forty-five years later, as Joshua 14:10 reckons it. The parenthesis dating Hebron seven years before Zoan in Egypt is read by Clarke as an answer to Egyptian claims of the oldest cities.

Numbers 13:23-24

One cluster takes two men and a staff, and the pomegranates and figs come back with it, so the evidence for the promise is carried home on the shoulders of the men who will advise against acting on it. The valley takes its name from that cluster, and Genesis 14:13 and 14:24 had already given Eshcol as the name of an Amorite at Hebron who stood with Abram, which Albert Barnes reads as an older place name taken up in a new sense. Clement of Alexandria, in The Instructor, read the great cluster as the Word crushed for us, and that is a reading of the fathers rather than a statement the text makes.

Numbers 13:25-26

Forty days out, and Numbers 14:34 turns those forty days into forty years at the rate of a year for a day. They come back to Kadesh in the wilderness of Paran and report to Moses, Aaron and the whole congregation at once, so the camp hears the account at the same moment the leaders do. John Gill records the Jewish tradition placing the return on the eighth or the ninth of Ab, the day later mourning fixed on.

Numbers 13:27-29

The report opens by confirming the promise word for word, since a land flowing with milk and honey is what God had said at Exodus 3:8 and 3:17. Then comes nevertheless, and everything after it is also true: the people strong, the cities walled and very great, the children of Anak there, Amalek in the south, Hittites and Jebusites and Amorites in the hills, Canaanites by the sea and along Jordan. Matthew Henry notes that even the men who discouraged Israel owned that the land was what God said it was. Every clause in these three verses is accurate, which is what makes verse 32 a different kind of speech.

Numbers 13:30

Caleb has to still the people first, which tells us how the room had already turned. He disputes none of the facts and answers with a timetable, let us go up at once and possess it, and Numbers 14:9 gives his ground when he and Joshua say the LORD is with us. Matthew Henry reads the whole difficulty as shrinking before a living faith in the power and the promise of God.

Numbers 13:31-32

The comparison is the whole of their argument, they are stronger than we, which measures Canaan against Israel and leaves God out of the sum. Then the account itself changes, and a land flowing with milk and honey at verse 27 becomes a land that eateth up the inhabitants thereof at verse 32. The Hebrew word behind evil report is dibbah, a word for slander, and Numbers 14:36-37 charges the ten with bringing up a slander upon the land and takes their lives by plague for it. Albert Barnes reads the phrase as a country exposed to constant attack from every quarter, which the men could have meant honestly, and the change from what they said five verses earlier stands either way.

Numbers 13:33

The word rendered giants here is nephilim, which stands in Genesis 6:4 and in this verse and in no other place in the Hebrew Bible. Joshua 11:21-22 records Anakim left alive in Gaza, Gath and Ashdod, and Goliath comes out of Gath at 1 Samuel 17:4, so the chain the text itself draws runs from before the flood to the valley of Elah. Watch what the ten actually say in the last clause: they report how they looked to themselves, as grasshoppers, and then assert how they looked to somebody else, which is a claim about the inside of another man's head. Adam Clarke grants that they had seen a large and warlike people, since neither Joshua nor Caleb ever denied that part of the report.