⁸ The officers shall continue to address the troops, saying, ‘Is anyone afraid or disheartened? He should go back to his house, or he might cause the heart of his comrades to melt like his own.’^(A)

³ Now, therefore, proclaim this in the hearing of the troops, ‘Whoever is fearful and trembling, let him return home.’ ” Thus Gideon sifted them out;^[a] twenty-two thousand returned, and ten thousand remained.^(A)

²⁸ Where are we headed? Our kindred have made our hearts melt by reporting, “The people are stronger and taller than we; the cities are large and fortified up to heaven! We actually saw there the offspring of the Anakim!” ’^(A)

⁸ But as for the cowardly, the faithless,^[a] the polluted, the murderers, the sexually immoral,^[b] the sorcerers, the idolaters, and all liars, their place will be in the lake that burns with fire and sulfur, which is the second death.”^(A)

³⁷ Barnabas wanted to take with them John called Mark.^{(A) 38} But Paul decided not to take with them one who had deserted them in Pamphylia and had not accompanied them in the work.^(B)

¹⁶ So, because you are lukewarm and neither cold nor hot, I am about to spit you out of my mouth.

⁶² And Jesus said to him, “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.”

Sanitary, Ritual, and Humanitarian Precepts

⁹ “When you are encamped against your enemies, you shall guard against every evil thing.

⁹ When they went up to the Wadi Eshcol and saw the land, they discouraged the hearts of the Israelites from going into the land that the Lord had given them.

³¹ Then the men who had gone up with him said, “We are not able to go up against this people, for they are stronger than we.”^{(A) 32} So they brought to the Israelites an unfavorable report of the land that they had spied out, saying, “The land that we have gone through as spies is a land that devours its inhabitants, and all the people that we saw in it are of great size.^{(B) 33} There we saw the Nephilim (the Anakites come from the Nephilim), and to ourselves we seemed like grasshoppers, and so we seemed to them.”^(C)

The People Rebel

14 Then all the congregation raised a loud cry, and the people wept that night. ² And all the Israelites complained against Moses and Aaron; the whole congregation said to them, “Would that we had died in the land of Egypt! Or would that we had died in this wilderness!^{(D) 3} Why is the Lord bringing us into this land to fall by the sword? Our wives and our little ones will become plunder; would it not be better for us to go back to Egypt?”