Numbers

Numbers 14:11–21

¹¹And 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? ¹²I will strike them with a plague and destroy them — and I will make you into a nation greater and mightier than they are.”

¹³But Moses said to the LORD, “The Egyptians will hear of it, for by Your strength You brought this people from among them. ¹⁴And they will tell it to the inhabitants of this land. They have already heard that You, O LORD, are in the midst of this people, that You, O LORD, have been seen face to face, that Your cloud stands over them, and that You go before them in a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night.

¹⁵If You kill this people as one man, the nations who have heard of Your fame will say, ¹⁶‘Because the LORD was unable to bring this people into the land He swore to give them, He has slaughtered them in the wilderness.’

¹⁷So now I pray, may the power of my Lord be magnified, just as You have declared: ¹⁸‘The LORD is slow to anger and abounding in loving devotion,^a forgiving iniquity and transgression. Yet He will by no means leave the guilty unpunished; He will visit the iniquity of the fathers upon their children to the third and fourth generation.’

¹⁹Pardon, I pray, the iniquity of this people, in keeping with the greatness of Your loving devotion, just as You have forgiven them ever since they left Egypt.”

²⁰“I have pardoned them as you requested,” the LORD replied. ²¹“Yet as surely as I live and as surely as the whole earth is filled with the glory of the LORD,

Footnotes

a 14:18 Forms of the Hebrew chesed are translated here and in most cases throughout the Scriptures as loving devotion; the range of meaning includes love, goodness, kindness, faithfulness, and mercy, as well as loyalty to a covenant.

Read all of Numbers 14