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Numbers 13: What the Passage Says

77 claims across 33 verses, in the order the chapter makes them.

Not a sermon outline. What Numbers 13 says, and what its hard words meant. The reading of it is yours.

The Chapter in a Sentence

The LORD tells Moses to send one leader from each tribe to scout the land of Canaan. The twelve men travel through the land for forty days and come back with grapes, pomegranates, and figs, reporting that the land is rich. They also report walled cities, strong people, and the descendants of Anak. Caleb says Israel can take the land, but the men who had gone up with him say it cannot be done and spread a bad report and say the people there made them feel like grasshoppers.

Claim by Claim

  1. 13:1
    • The LORD spoke to Moses.
  2. 13:2
    • The LORD told Moses to send men to scout the land of Canaan.
    • The LORD said he was giving the land of Canaan to the children of Israel.
    • The LORD said one man from each of their fathers' tribes was to be sent.
    • The LORD said each man sent was to be a leader among them.
  3. 13:3
    • Moses sent them from the wilderness of Paran.
    • Moses sent them at the command of the LORD.
    • All those men were heads of the children of Israel.
  4. 13:4
    • These were the names of the men.
    • From the tribe of Reuben, Shammua son of Zaccur.
  5. 13:5
    • From the tribe of Simeon, Shaphat son of Hori.
  6. 13:6
    • From the tribe of Judah, Caleb son of Jephunneh.
  7. 13:7
    • From the tribe of Issachar, Igal son of Joseph.
  8. 13:8
    • From the tribe of Ephraim, Hoshea son of Nun.
  9. 13:9
    • From the tribe of Benjamin, Palti son of Raphu.
  10. 13:10
    • From the tribe of Zebulun, Gaddiel son of Sodi.
  11. 13:11
    • From the tribe of Joseph, that is, from the tribe of Manasseh, Gaddi son of Susi.
  12. 13:12
    • From the tribe of Dan, Ammiel son of Gemalli.
  13. 13:13
    • From the tribe of Asher, Sethur son of Michael.
  14. 13:14
    • From the tribe of Naphtali, Nahbi son of Vophsi.
  15. 13:15
    • From the tribe of Gad, Geuel son of Machi.
  16. 13:16
    • These were the names of the men Moses sent to scout the land.
    • Moses called Hoshea son of Nun by the name Joshua.
  17. 13:17
    • Moses sent them to scout the land of Canaan.
    • Moses told them to go up through the Negev.
    • Moses told them to go up into the hill country.
  18. 13:18
    • Moses told them to see what the land was like.
    • Moses told them to see whether the people living there were strong or weak.
    • Moses told them to see whether the people were few or many.
  19. 13:19
    • Moses told them to see whether the land they lived in was good or bad.
    • Moses told them to see what the cities they lived in were like.
    • Moses told them to see whether the cities were open camps or fortifications.
  20. 13:20
    • Moses told them to see whether the land was fertile or lean.
    • Moses told them to see whether there were trees in it or not.
    • Moses told them to be courageous.
    • Moses told them to bring back some of the fruit of the land.
    • It was the season of the first ripe grapes.
  21. 13:21
    • They went up and scouted the land.
    • They scouted from the wilderness of Zin as far as Rehob, at the approach to Hamath.
  22. 13:22
    • They went up through the Negev.
    • They came to Hebron.
    • Ahiman, Sheshai, and Talmai were there.
    • Ahiman, Sheshai, and Talmai were descendants of Anak.
    • Hebron was built seven years before Zoan in Egypt.
  23. 13:23
    • They came to the valley of Eshcol.
    • They cut down from there a branch with one cluster of grapes.
    • They carried the cluster on a pole between two of them.
    • They took some of the pomegranates.
    • They took some of the figs.
  24. 13:24
    • That place was called the valley of Eshcol.
    • The place was named because of the cluster of grapes the children of Israel cut down there.
  25. 13:25
    • They returned from scouting the land at the end of forty days.
  26. 13:26
    • They went and came to Moses and Aaron and the whole congregation of the children of Israel.
    • They came to the wilderness of Paran, to Kadesh.
    • They brought back word to them and to the whole congregation.
    • They showed them the fruit of the land.
  27. 13:27
    • They gave their account, saying they had come to the land to which Moses sent them.
    • They said the land flows with milk and honey.
    • They said the fruit they brought was the fruit of that land.
  28. 13:28
    • They said the people living in the land are strong.
    • They said the cities are fortified and very large.
    • They said they saw the descendants of Anak there.
  29. 13:29
    • Amalek dwells in the land of the Negev.
    • The Hittites, the Jebusites, and the Amorites dwell in the hill country.
    • The Canaanites dwell by the sea and along the Jordan.
  30. 13:30
    • Caleb quieted the people before Moses.
    • Caleb said they should certainly go up and take possession of the land.
    • Caleb said they are well able to overcome it.
  31. 13:31
    • The men who had gone up with Caleb said they were not able to go up against the people.
    • They said the people are stronger than they are.
  32. 13:32
    • They spread a bad report about the land they had scouted among the children of Israel.
    • They said the land they passed through to scout it is a land that devours its inhabitants.
    • They said all the people they saw in it are men of great stature.
  33. 13:33
    • They said they saw the Nephilim there.
    • They said the sons of Anak come from the Nephilim.
    • They said they seemed like grasshoppers in their own sight.
    • They said they seemed the same in the sight of those people.

Words Worth Explaining

Every language note in this chapter, gathered. These explain what a word meant, never what it means for the reader.

13:1
In the King James Version "LORD" printed in capitals stands in for the personal name of Israel's God, written in Hebrew with four consonants (YHWH). Ordinary "Lord" translates a different Hebrew word meaning "master."
13:2
Canaan is the region between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, roughly modern Israel and the Palestinian territories, together with parts of Lebanon and southwestern Syria. The King James "search the land" means survey or scout it, not hunt through it.
13:3
Paran is a desert region in the north-eastern Sinai peninsula, between Mount Sinai and the southern edge of Canaan.
13:4
The twelve tribes are the descendants of the twelve sons of Jacob, also called Israel. Sending one leading man from each tribe means the scouting party officially represents the whole nation, not just Moses.
13:11
Joseph had no tribe under his own name. His two sons, Ephraim and Manasseh, each headed a tribe, so "the tribe of Joseph" needs the clarification that Manasseh is meant (Ephraim was already listed in verse 8). With the tribe of Levi left out of these lists (Levites had duties at the sanctuary and no territory of their own) the count still comes to twelve.
13:16
Both names are Hebrew sentences. Oshea (usually spelled Hoshea) means "he saves"; Jehoshua, the name normally spelled Joshua in English, adds the divine name, so it means "the LORD saves." The King James uses the older transliterations here, which is why the same man appears under two unfamiliar spellings.
13:17
"Southward" translates the Hebrew word Negev, which is the name of a specific dry region south of the Canaanite hill country, not simply a compass direction. "The mountain" means the central highland ridge running north from there, hill country, not a single peak.
13:19
This is military reconnaissance. Whether people live in open camps or behind walls decides how a war would be fought: unwalled settlements can be overrun by a raiding force, while a walled town has to be stormed or starved out, which takes an army with siege equipment and time.
13:20
The first grapes ripen around midsummer, in July, so the mission set out at the point in the year when the season's produce was just becoming available as evidence.
13:21
Zin is the desert at the southern edge of Canaan; Rehob and the approach to Hamath lie far to the north, near the Lebanon valley. Naming the two extremes is a way of saying they covered the length of the whole land.
13:22
Hebron is a town in the southern hill country, about nineteen miles south of the site of Jerusalem. Anak is remembered in these texts as the ancestor of a people of unusual height, the Anakim. Zoan is the Egyptian city the Greeks called Tanis, in the Nile delta; anyone who had lived in Egypt would know how old it was, so dating Hebron by it tells the reader Hebron is an ancient place.
13:23
The King James "brook" translates a word for a wadi, a valley with a stream that runs in the rainy season and is often dry the rest of the year. Grapes, pomegranates and figs were the standard fruit crops of the region, so the sample is a summary of what the land produces.
13:24
The point of the sentence is a pun that only works in Hebrew: eshkol is the ordinary word for a cluster of grapes.
13:25
Forty is a round number in Hebrew for a long, complete stretch of time rather than an exact count. It matters here because in the next chapter the forty days of scouting are turned into forty years of wandering, one year for each day.
13:26
Kadesh, often called Kadesh-barnea, is a large oasis on the southern edge of the settled land, roughly fifty miles south of Beersheba. It served as the Israelites' base for a long stretch of the wilderness period.
13:27
"Flowing with milk and honey" is a stock phrase for a fertile country. Milk stands for pasture good enough to keep herds and flocks; honey means wild honey, and possibly also the thick syrup boiled down from dates or grapes. It describes natural abundance rather than farmland worked by hand.
13:28
City walls in Canaan at this period could be many feet thick, built on stone footings with a steep earth slope below them. An army without siege engines had almost no way through one, which is why the scouts treat the walls as the decisive fact.
13:29
These are the peoples the Israelites expected to find in place. The Amalekites were a nomadic group of the southern desert; the Hittites, Jebusites and Amorites are named here as highland populations, the Jebusites specifically holding the site that later became Jerusalem; "Canaanites" is used here in a narrower sense for those settled on the coastal plain and in the Jordan valley.
13:30
"Stilled" simply means quieted or hushed. Caleb is trying to cut off the panic spreading through the crowd before it takes hold. He and Joshua are the only two of the twelve who argue for going in.
13:32
The King James "evil report" translates a Hebrew phrase closer to a defamatory or slanderous report, not merely bad news, but a damaging account. The image of a land that "eats up" its inhabitants is deliberately open: it can suggest ground too harsh to support those who live on it, or a country so fought over that it consumes them.
13:33
The Hebrew word behind "giants" here is Nephilim, which most modern translations leave untranslated because its meaning is uncertain; the King James "giants" follows the ancient Greek version, which used the word for the giants of Greek legend. The same word appears in Genesis 6:4 for a group living before the flood. Grasshoppers, common and easily crushed underfoot, were a standing image for something insignificant.

Read Numbers 13