⁶ The Israelites had traveled in the wilderness for forty years until all the men who were old enough to fight in battle when they left Egypt had died. For they had disobeyed the Lord, and the Lord vowed he would not let them enter the land he had sworn to give us—a land flowing with milk and honey.

²³ They will never even see the land I swore to give their ancestors. None of those who have treated me with contempt will ever see it.

¹⁴ “Thirty-eight years passed from the time we first left Kadesh-barnea until we finally crossed the Zered Brook! By then, all the men old enough to fight in battle had died in the wilderness, as the Lord had vowed would happen.

⁷ For the Lord your God has blessed you in everything you have done. He has watched your every step through this great wilderness. During these forty years, the Lord your God has been with you, and you have lacked nothing.”’

³ But forty years after the Israelites left Egypt, on the first day of the eleventh month,^[a] Moses addressed the people of Israel, telling them everything the Lord had commanded him to say.

⁸ So I have come down to rescue them from the power of the Egyptians and lead them out of Egypt into their own fertile and spacious land. It is a land flowing with milk and honey—the land where the Canaanites, Hittites, Amorites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites now live.

² “Go and shout this message to Jerusalem. This is what the Lord says:

⁴ For all these forty years your clothes didn’t wear out, and your feet didn’t blister or swell.