Exploring Canaan

13 The Lord said to Moses, ² ‘Send some men to explore the land of Canaan, which I am giving to the Israelites. From each ancestral tribe send one of its leaders.’

³ So at the Lord’s command Moses sent them out from the Desert of Paran. All of them were leaders of the Israelites.

²⁵ At the end of forty days they returned from exploring the land.

Report on the exploration

²⁶ They came back to Moses and Aaron and the whole Israelite community at Kadesh in the Desert of Paran. There they reported to them and to the whole assembly and showed them the fruit of the land. ²⁷ They gave Moses this account: ‘We went into the land to which you sent us, and it does flow with milk and honey! Here is its fruit. ²⁸ But the people who live there are powerful, and the cities are fortified and very large. We even saw descendants of Anak there. ²⁹ The Amalekites live in the Negev; the Hittites, Jebusites and Amorites live in the hill country; and the Canaanites live near the sea and along the Jordan.’

³⁰ Then Caleb silenced the people before Moses and said, ‘We should go up and take possession of the land, for we can certainly do it.’

³¹ But the men who had gone up with him said, ‘We can’t attack those people; they are stronger than we are.’ ³² And they spread among the Israelites a bad report about the land they had explored. They said, ‘The land we explored devours those living in it. All the people we saw there are of great size.