The Spies Explore Canaan
13 The Lord said to Moses, 2 “Send men to explore the land of Canaan, which I will give to the Israelites. Send one leader from each tribe.”
3 So Moses obeyed the Lord’s command and sent the Israelite leaders out from the Desert of Paran. 4 These are their names: from the tribe of Reuben, Shammua son of Zaccur; 5 from the tribe of Simeon, Shaphat son of Hori; 6 from the tribe of Judah, Caleb son of Jephunneh; 7 from the tribe of Issachar, Igal son of Joseph; 8 from the tribe of Ephraim, Hoshea son of Nun; 9 from the tribe of Benjamin, Palti son of Raphu; 10 from the tribe of Zebulun, Gaddiel son of Sodi; 11 from the tribe of Manasseh (a tribe of Joseph), Gaddi son of Susi; 12 from the tribe of Dan, Ammiel son of Gemalli; 13 from the tribe of Asher, Sethur son of Michael; 14 from the tribe of Naphtali, Nahbi son of Vophsi; 15 from the tribe of Gad, Geuel son of Maki.
16 These are the names of the men Moses sent to explore the land. (Moses gave Hoshea son of Nun the new name Joshua.)
17 Moses sent them to explore Canaan and said, “Go through southern Canaan and then into the mountains. 18 See what the land looks like. Are the people who live there strong or weak? Are there a few or many? 19 What kind of land do they live in? Is it good or bad? What about the towns they live in—are they open like camps, or do they have walls? 20 What about the soil? Is it fertile or poor? Are there trees there? Try to bring back some of the fruit from that land.” (It was the season for the first grapes.)
21 So they went up and explored the land, from the Desert of Zin all the way to Rehob by Lebo Hamath. 22 They went through the southern area to Hebron, where Ahiman, Sheshai, and Talmai, the descendants of Anak lived. (The city of Hebron had been built seven years before Zoan in Egypt.) 23 In the Valley of Eshcol, they cut off a branch of a grapevine that had one bunch of grapes on it and carried that branch on a pole between two of them. They also got some pomegranates and figs. 24 That place was called the Valley of Eshcol,[a] because the Israelites cut off the bunch of grapes there. 25 After forty days of exploring the land, the men returned to the camp.
26 They came back to Moses and Aaron and all the Israelites at Kadesh, in the Desert of Paran. The men reported to them and showed everybody the fruit from the land. 27 They told Moses, “We went to the land where you sent us, and it is a fertile land! Here is some of its fruit. 28 But the people who live there are strong. Their cities are walled and very large. We even saw some Anakites there. 29 The Amalekites live in the southern area; the Hittites, Jebusites, and Amorites live in the mountains; and the Canaanites live near the sea and along the Jordan River.”
30 Then Caleb told the people near Moses to be quiet, and he said, “We should certainly go up and take the land for ourselves. We can certainly do it.”
31 But the men who had gone with him said, “We can’t attack those people; they are stronger than we are.” 32 And those men gave the Israelites a bad report about the land they explored, saying, “The land that we explored is too large to conquer. All the people we saw are very tall. 33 We saw the Nephilim people there. (The Anakites come from the Nephilim people.) We felt like grasshoppers, and we looked like grasshoppers to them.”
Footnotes
- 13:24 Eshcol This name in Hebrew means “bunch.”