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.

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.)

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.”