Numbers 14:26-38

New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition

An Attempted Invasion Is Repulsed

²⁶ And the Lord spoke to Moses and to Aaron, saying, ²⁷ “How long shall this wicked congregation complain against me? I have heard the complaints of the Israelites, which they complain against me.^{(A) 28} Say to them, ‘As I live,’ says the Lord, ‘I will do to you the very things I heard you say:^{(B) 29} your dead bodies shall fall in this very wilderness, and of all your number included in the census from twenty years old and up who have complained against me,^{(C) 30} not one of you shall come into the land in which I swore to settle you, except Caleb son of Jephunneh and Joshua son of Nun.^{(D) 31} But your little ones, who you said would become plunder, I will bring in, and they shall know the land that you have despised.^{(E) 32} But as for you, your dead bodies shall fall in this wilderness.^{(F) 33} And your children shall be shepherds in the wilderness for forty years and shall suffer for your faithlessness, until the last of your dead bodies lies in the wilderness.^{(G) 34} According to the number of the days in which you spied out the land, forty days, for every day a year, you shall bear your iniquity, forty years, and you shall know my displeasure.’^{(H) 35} I the Lord have spoken; surely I will do thus to all this wicked congregation gathered together against me: in this wilderness they shall come to a full end, and there they shall die.”^(I)

³⁶ And the men whom Moses sent to spy out the land who returned and made all the congregation complain against him by bringing a bad report about the land,^{(J) 37} the men who brought an unfavorable report about the land died by a plague before the Lord. ³⁸ But Joshua son of Nun and Caleb son of Jephunneh alone remained alive, of those men who went to spy out the land.^(K)