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.’

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. ³³ We saw the Nephilim there (the descendants of Anak come from the Nephilim). We seemed like grasshoppers in our own eyes, and we looked the same to them.’