Numbers

Numbers 14:15–24

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.

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