Numbers 13:26

The men had been sent out from this same wilderness, one leader from each tribe, to search out the land (Numbers 13:1–25). Now they come back and report to everyone at once: to Moses, to Aaron, and “to all the congregation of the children of Israel”. The verse names the congregation a second time when the word is given, so the whole people hears the report and the whole people will answer it. The response that follows in Numbers 14 is the decision of the nation, and the consequences fall on the nation.

The wilderness of Paran, Paran in Hebrew, a name meaning “ornamental”, is the wide desert south of Canaan. The spies had just walked through a land of plenty, and they come back to the barren ground where Israel had been living. Kadesh, often called Kadesh-barnea, was an oasis and a major camp for Israel at the edge of the land, the natural place to gather before going in. Its name, Qadesh, means “sanctuary” or “holy”. There is a sad irony in that, because this holy place is where Israel’s unbelief broke out and where the forty years in the wilderness were decreed.

They “brought back word”, and the Hebrew behind it joins shuv, to turn back or return, with davar, which means word or speech and can also mean a matter or thing. The spies returned with the account of what they had seen.

Then they “shewed them the fruit of the land.” This is the fruit from Eshcol, a cluster of grapes so large that two men carried it on a staff, with pomegranates and figs (Numbers 13:23). The word for fruit, pᵉrîy, is used of fruit both literally and figuratively, and it can also mean a reward. Here it is real produce the people can see and handle. Showing it to the gathered assembly was a natural way to prove the land’s fertility, and it confirmed what God had said about the land (Exodus 3:8). That evidence should have strengthened Israel’s trust in the God who promised it, and the people’s fear in the next chapter is all the more to blame because they had seen it.

The spies begin with the good news, and they tell it to Moses, who sent them: “We came unto the land whither thou sentest us.” They speak as eyewitnesses who went where they were sent and saw for themselves.

Their first verdict confirms God’s own words. When the LORD called Moses at the bush he promised to bring Israel to a land flowing with milk and honey (Exodus 3:8), and he used the same description in the law (Leviticus 20:24). Moses later describes the good land at length (Deuteronomy 8:7–9). This was the land God had promised to Abraham’s offspring centuries before (Genesis 12:7), and now Israel’s own scouts say “surely” it is as he said. Even the men who would soon turn the people’s hearts away could only confirm that God had told the truth, and that God’s blessings come in solid, material form as well as spiritual.

The verb zûwb, “floweth”, means to flow freely, as water does, and it can also mean to overflow. The picture is of milk and honey running freely through the land. The verb has other uses in the law, and this phrase is one of them. Châlâb is milk, which Strong’s describes as “the richness of kine”. Milk was a highly valued food, and plenty of it means healthy flocks and herds on good pasture. Dᵉbash is honey, the sweet substance made by bees or from fruits such as dates. Together, milk for nourishment and honey for sweetness make a well-known picture of a land rich in all that sustains life and much that delights. After the wilderness Israel had crossed, it was a land worth having.

“And this is the fruit of it.” The spies hold up the evidence as they speak, so the congregation has more than their word. The grapes, pomegranates and figs were there to see.

With one word the report turns. “Nevertheless” sets everything after it against the good land of verse 27, and the spies’ attention moves from the land to the people who hold it. Verse 28 is the heart of the fearful report, and it says three things.

First, “the people be strong that dwell in the land.” The word for strong, ʻaz, comes from a root meaning to be strong or fierce, and it can describe power that is vehement and harsh. The spies judge these people too strong for Israel to overcome in its own strength.

Second, “the cities are walled, and very great.” The word for walled, bâtsar, comes from a root meaning to cut off or enclose, and here it describes cities fortified so as to be hard to reach. Walled towns were common in Canaan, built for defence and to guard trade routes and farmland, so the spies described what was really there. “Very great” adds size to strength: these were large, well-established cities. For a people lately out of Egypt, with little experience of siege warfare, they were a daunting sight.

Third, and weightiest, “moreover we saw the children of Anak there.” The Anakim, from ʻÂnâq, were a people known for their great height. The name may come from a word for neck or necklace. Deuteronomy counts them among the giants, with the Emim and the Rephaim (Deuteronomy 2:10–11). The sons of Anak are the climax of the report, and a little later the spies go further and say that beside them they felt like “grasshoppers” (Numbers 13:33).

The whole verse is about the strength of people. The LORD who brought Israel out of Egypt and promised them this land is absent from it from beginning to end. Moses recalls this same report when he retells the journey, as the moment Israel’s heart failed (Deuteronomy 1:28).

Verse 29 maps the land by its peoples, from the south to the hills to the sea and the Jordan. The English “dwell” stands three times in this verse, and behind it is yâshab, to sit down, remain, inhabit or settle. Each of these peoples was settled in the place it held.

The Amalekites dwell “in the land of the south”, the dry Negeb that borders Canaan on the side of the Sinai wilderness, which was the side Israel would come from. They were a raiding people and already Israel’s enemies, for they had attacked Israel soon after the Exodus (Exodus 17:8–16).

The Hittites, the Jebusites and the Amorites dwell “in the mountains”. The word har means a mountain or a range of hills, and here it is the hill country that runs north and south through the middle of the land, rugged ground that is easy to defend. These Hittites share their name with the great power of Anatolia and were probably a local group related to them. The Jebusites held Jerusalem, then called Jebus, a vital stronghold in the hills. “Amorites” is a broad name for powerful peoples of the highlands and the land east of the Jordan.

The Canaanites dwell “by the sea, and by the coast of Jordan”, that is, on the Mediterranean coastal plain and in the Jordan valley. Both were rich farmland on routes of trade, and the Jordan valley was also a way into the land from the east. “Coast” translates yâd, which literally means hand and is used here for a side or border, the land along the Jordan.

So the report covers every region, the southern border, the hills at the centre and the best farmland, and in each one a people is already settled.

Caleb answered at once and quieted the people before Moses, urging them to go up (Numbers 13:30). The other men who had gone with him insisted that the people of the land were “stronger than we” (Numbers 13:31–32). The congregation wept and rebelled against Moses and against God, while Caleb and Joshua pleaded with them to trust the LORD (Numbers 14:1–10). God then sentenced that generation to forty years in the wilderness (Numbers 14:26–35).

A psalm looks back on this very moment and laments that Israel despised the “pleasant land” and refused to trust God’s word (Psalm 106:24–25). The letter to the Hebrews takes this generation as its warning to Christians and calls us to enter God’s rest by faith (Hebrews 3–4). The Psalms give the answer the spies needed. One sets trust in the name of the LORD against trust in human strength (Psalm 20:7), and another opens, “The LORD is my light and my salvation” (Psalm 27:1).

God kept his word all the same. In the next generation Joshua defeated the Anakim and took possession of the land (Joshua 11:21–23), and Scripture sums up the conquest by saying that the LORD’s good promises to Israel had all come to pass (Joshua 21:43–45).

The land and its fruit point beyond themselves to what God gives in Christ. Like Abraham, God’s people now look for “a better country”, a heavenly one (Hebrews 11:16), and an incorruptible inheritance kept for us (1 Peter 1:3–5). In Christ God has blessed us with every spiritual blessing (Ephesians 1:3–14), and all the promises of God are yea in him (2 Corinthians 1:20).

The abundance of Canaan is a picture of the life Jesus gives. He came “that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly” (John 10:10). He is the bread of life (John 6:35) and the giver of living water (John 4:10). As the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world (John 1:29), he opens the way into the rest that the wilderness generation lost (Hebrews 4:1–11).

The giants have their answer in him as well. Jesus has overcome the world (John 16:33). At the cross he forgave our sins and triumphed over the principalities and powers (Colossians 2:13–15), and through death he destroyed the devil, who had the power of death (Hebrews 2:14–15). He gives us the victory over death itself (1 Corinthians 15:54–57). Sin, death and the devil are the strongholds that held us, and he is the true Joshua who has taken them and leads his people into the inheritance he has won. Believers stand against the powers of evil in the Lord’s strength and armour (Ephesians 6:10–18), and in Christ we are more than conquerors (Romans 8:37).

These four verses put two true reports side by side: the land is good, and the land is defended. God had promised the land and had spoken of the nations he would drive out of it, so both halves of the report were known to him before the spies ever set out. The fruit in their hands was his own proof that he keeps his word, carried back by the very men who went on to doubt him.

What the passage shows of God is that his word about the land was true to the last cluster of grapes, and his word about its peoples proved just as true when Joshua led the next generation in. Caleb looked at the same walls and the same sons of Anak and called Israel to go up, because he weighed them against the LORD. The promises we hold in Christ come from the same God, and they are as sure as the grapes of Eshcol were in Israel’s sight that day at Kadesh.