Numbers14chapter 14

Numbers 14:1-2

The whole camp weeps a night away over a report about a country none of them has seen. Their wish is stated twice and the second form of it is the one to hold on to, would God we had died in this wilderness. Verse 29 gives them that exact thing in almost those words, and verse 28 says outright that the sentence is their own sentence read back.

Numbers 14:3-4

The complaint moves from grief to a plan in one verse. They propose a captain and a return to Egypt, which reverses everything the last two books did, and Nehemiah 9:17 looks back on this moment and says that in their rebellion they appointed a captain to return to their bondage. What they say will become a prey, their wives and children, is what verse 31 promises to bring in.

Numbers 14:5-6

Four men act while the nation shouts, and they act in two different ways. Moses and Aaron go face down before the assembly, which is the posture of men interceding. Joshua and Caleb rend their clothes, which is the sign of a death or a blasphemy heard.

Numbers 14:7-9

Joshua and Caleb dispute none of the facts the other ten reported and draw the opposite conclusion from them. Their argument has three parts: the land is good, the LORD is able if he delight in us, and the people of it are bread for us because their defence is departed from them. The one thing they ask is that Israel not rebel, so they name the danger as the camp rather than as Canaan.

Numbers 14:10

The answer to the minority report is a call to kill the men who gave it. The glory of the LORD appears in the same verse and stops the stoning without a word being spoken. Two things happen in one sentence and the text sets no connective between them.

Numbers 14:11-12

God names the charge as unbelief rather than cowardice, how long will it be ere they believe me, for all the signs which I have shewed among them. Hebrews 3:19 reads the whole episode that way, saying they could not enter in because of unbelief. Then comes the offer to start again from Moses and make of him a greater nation, which is the same offer made at Exodus 32:10 after the calf.

Numbers 14:13-16

Moses answers the offer by arguing about what Egypt and Canaan will conclude, and he never once argues that Israel deserves better. His case is that the nations will say the LORD was not able to bring this people into the land. It is the same argument he made at Exodus 32:12, and both times he puts God's reputation where a man would have put his own advantage.

Numbers 14:17-19

Moses says according as thou hast spoken and then quotes God's own words back to him. What he quotes is the self-description of Exodus 34:6-7, given to him on the mountain after the calf, and he keeps the hard half of it as well as the mild half. This is the earliest place in Scripture where a man prays a sentence of God's own back to God, and the words he chooses are the words spoken to a nation that had just failed.

Numbers 14:20

The pardon is granted in six words and the rest of the chapter still falls on them. Israel is not destroyed and is not disinherited, and every adult who murmured still dies in the desert. Commentators divide over how to hold those two together, some reading the pardon as remitting the nation's destruction while leaving the generation's discipline, and the chapter states both facts and reconciles neither.

Numbers 14:21

In the middle of passing sentence God swears by his own life that the whole earth will be filled with his glory. The oath is larger than the failure it answers and it does not depend on this generation. Isaiah 11:9 and Habakkuk 2:14 both carry the same line forward.

Numbers 14:22-23

The book keeps its own tally and gives the number here. Ten times covers the sea, Marah, the wilderness of Sin, Rephidim, the calf, Taberah, Kibroth-hattaavah and this, and the older commentators list them in slightly different ways. What the sentence turns on is stated in the same verse, that these are men who saw the miracles and have not hearkened to my voice.

Numbers 14:24-25

Caleb is named alone here and Joshua is added at verse 30, and the reason given for Caleb is another spirit with him and following fully. The land he walked in is the land his seed will hold, which Joshua 14:6-14 records him claiming forty-five years later at eighty-five. Then the order of march reverses, back toward the Red sea, which is the direction they came from.

Numbers 14:26-27

The sentence is delivered a second time and this time it is addressed to the people rather than to Moses alone. The word murmur falls three times in one verse, and the chapter uses it five times in all. God says he has heard the murmurings, which answers the assumption in verse 2 that complaining among themselves was a private act.

Numbers 14:28-30

The sentence is their own words returned to them, and the verse says so before it says anything else. They had wished to die in this wilderness at verse 2, and verse 29 gives it back as your carcases shall fall in this wilderness. Every man numbered from twenty years old and upward is included, with Caleb and Joshua named as the two exceptions, which is exactly what Numbers 26:64-65 reports at the end of the forty years.

Numbers 14:31-32

The thing they said would be lost is the thing that is kept. Their children go in, and the verse quotes the parents' own phrase back at them as it says so. The generation that would not go dies where it stood and the generation it feared for inherits.

Numbers 14:33-34

The length of the sentence is measured out of the length of the errand, forty days searching answered by forty years bearing, and verse 34 states the rule as each day for a year. Ezekiel 4:6 states the same rule a second time and later prophetic reckonings are built on it. The closing phrase of verse 34, ye shall know my breach of promise, is a hard rendering, since the Hebrew word behind breach of promise is read by others as opposition or alienation, and the American Standard Version gives my alienation.

Numbers 14:35-38

The ten men who brought the report die first and they die by plague, before any of the forty years begins. What the text charges them with is bringing up a slander upon the land, so the offence is what they said about a place. Joshua and Caleb lived still, and that short sentence is the whole of their reward until Joshua 14.

Numbers 14:39-42

They mourn, and then early the next morning they do the thing they refused to do the day before. Saying we have sinned and going up anyway is what Moses calls transgressing the commandment of the LORD, because the command had changed overnight to turn back. Sorrow and obedience are two different things and the chapter shows the gap between them.

Numbers 14:43-45

They presume to go up and the ark of the covenant and Moses stay in the camp, so the army goes without the two things that made it an army. Amalek is there, as it was at Rephidim in Exodus 17, and the rout runs as far as Hormah. Deuteronomy 1:41-45 retells the same day and adds that they wept before the LORD and he would not hearken.