The Father Sends out Scouts

Sent by our Father, twelve scouts spend forty days in Canaan and come back with the same fruit and two different verdicts. Caleb says go up now; the rest say the people are giants and we are grasshoppers. Fear, not evidence, wins the report and the crowd.

Chapter 13.

Our Father said to Moses,

"send men to scout the land of Canaan, which I'm giving Israel's people. Send one man per ancestral tribe, each a leader among them."

So Moses sent them from the wilderness of Paran at our Father's command; all were leaders of Israel's people. These were their names: from the tribe of Reuben, Shammua the son of Zaccur;

from the tribe of Simeon, Shaphat the son of Hori;

from the tribe of Judah, Caleb the son of Jephunneh;

from the tribe of Issachar, Igal the son of Joseph;

from the tribe of Ephraim, Hoshea the son of Nun;

from the tribe of Benjamin, Palti the son of Raphu;

from the tribe of Zebulun, Gaddiel the son of Sodi;

from the tribe of Joseph (that is, from the tribe of Manasseh), Gaddi the son of Susi;

from the tribe of Dan, Ammiel the son of Gemalli;

from the tribe of Asher, Sethur the son of Michael;

from the tribe of Naphtali, Nahbi the son of Vophsi;

from the tribe of Gad, Geuel the son of Machi.

These are the names of the men Moses sent to scout the land. Moses named Hoshea son of Nun, Joshua. ^a Moses sent them to scout the land of Canaan and said to them, "Go up this way into the Negev, go up into the hill country, and see what the land is like, and whether the people living there are strong or weak, few or many, and whether the towns they live in are open camps or fortified, and whether the land is good or bad, and whether the land is rich or poor, and whether it has trees or not. Be brave, and bring back fruit from the land." It was the season of the first ripe grapes.

So they went up and explored the land from the wilderness of Zin to Rehob, near Lebo-hamath. They went up through the Negev to Hebron, where Ahiman, Sheshai, and Talmai, Anak's descendants, lived. Hebron was built seven years before Zoan in Egypt. They reached the Valley of Eshcol and cut a branch with one cluster of grapes, carried on a pole between two men; they also brought pomegranates and figs. That place was named Valley of Eshcol, since the Israelites cut a cluster of grapes there.

A Land of Promise and Fear

At the end of forty days they returned from exploring the land. They came to Moses, Aaron, and the whole community of Israel in the wilderness of Paran, at Kadesh, reported back to them and the whole community, and showed them the land's fruit. They told him, "We went to the land you sent us to. It truly flows with milk and honey; here is its fruit. Yet the people in the land are strong, the cities fortified and very large—we even saw Anak's descendants there. Amalekites live in the Negev. Hittites, Jebusites, and Amorites live in the hills. Canaanites live along the sea and beside the Jordan."

Caleb silenced the people before Moses and said, "Let's go up now and possess it—we can certainly overcome it."

But the men who went up with him said, "We can't go up against the people, for they are stronger than we are." So they gave Israel a bad report of the land they had explored, saying, "The land we crossed to explore devours its inhabitants, and everyone we saw there is of great size. There we saw the Nephilim—Anak's descendants come from the Nephilim. We seemed like grasshoppers to ourselves, and so we seemed to them." ^b

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Numbers 13

The Father Sends out Scouts

A Land of Promise and Fear

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