Numbers 14:13–39

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, ²²not 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 — ²³not 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.

²⁴But because My servant Caleb has a different spirit and has followed Me wholeheartedly, I will bring him into the land he has entered, and his descendants will inherit it.

²⁵Now since the Amalekites and Canaanites are living in the valleys, turn back tomorrow and head for the wilderness along the route to the Red Sea.^b”

²⁶Then the LORD said to Moses and Aaron, ²⁷“How long will this wicked congregation grumble against Me? I have heard the complaints that the Israelites are making against Me. ²⁸So tell them: As surely as I live, declares the LORD, I will do to you exactly as I heard you say. ²⁹Your 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.

³⁰Surely none of you will enter the land in which I swore to settle you, except Caleb son of Jephunneh and Joshua son of Nun. ³¹But I will bring your children, whom you said would become plunder, into the land you have rejected — and they will enjoy it. ³²As for you, however, your bodies will fall in this wilderness.

³³Your 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. ³⁴In 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.

³⁵I, the LORD, have spoken, and I will surely do these things to this entire wicked congregation, which has conspired against Me. They will meet their end in the wilderness, and there they will die.”

³⁶So the men Moses had sent to spy out the land, who had returned and made the whole congregation grumble against him by bringing out a bad report about the land— ³⁷those men who had brought out the bad report about the land— were struck down by a plague before the LORD. ³⁸Of those men who had gone to spy out the land, only Joshua son of Nun and Caleb son of Jephunneh remained alive.

³⁹And when Moses relayed these words to all the Israelites, the people mourned bitterly.