GOD spoke to Moses, saying,
“Send agents to scout the land of Canaan, which I am giving to the Israelite people; send someone from each of their ancestral tribes, each one a chieftain among them.”
So Moses, by GOD’s command, sent them out from the wilderness of Paran—all of them being men of consequence, leaders of the Israelites.
And these were their names:From the tribe of Reuben, Shammua son of Zaccur.
From the tribe of Simeon, Shaphat son of Hori.
From the tribe of Judah, Caleb son of Jephunneh.
From the tribe of Issachar, Igal son of Joseph.
From the tribe of Ephraim, HoseaaHosea Or “Hoshea.” son of Nun.
From the tribe of Benjamin, Palti son of Rafu.
From the tribe of Zebulun, Gaddiel son of Sodi.
From the tribe of Joseph, namely, the tribe of Manasseh, Gaddi son of Susi.
From the tribe of Dan, Ammiel son of Gemalli.
From the tribe of Asher, Sethur son of Michael.
From the tribe of Naphtali, Nahbi son of Vophsi.
From the tribe of Gad, Geuel son of Machi.
These are the names of the men whom Moses sent to scout the land; but Moses changed the name of HoseabHosea Or “Hoshea.” son of Nun to Joshua.
When Moses sent them to scout the land of Canaan, he said to them, “Go up there into the Negeb and on into the hill country,
and see what kind of country it is. Are the people who dwell in it strong or weak, few or many?
Is the country in which they dwell good or bad? Are the towns they live in open or fortified?
Is the soil rich or poor? Is it wooded or not? And take pains to bring back some of the fruit of the land.”—Now it happened to be the season of the first ripe grapes.
They went up and scouted the land, from the wilderness of Zin to Rehob, at Lebo-hamath.cLebo-hamath In contrast to others “the entrance to Hamath.”
They went up into the Negeb and came to Hebron, where lived Ahiman, Sheshai, and Talmai, the Anakites.—Now Hebron was founded seven years before Zoan of Egypt.—
They reached the wadi Eshcol, and there they cut down a branch with a single cluster of grapes—it had to be borne on a carrying frame by two of them—and some pomegranates and figs.
That place was named the wadi EshcoldEshcol I.e., “cluster.” because of the cluster that the Israelites cut down there.
At the end of forty days they returned from scouting the land.
They went straight to Moses and Aaron and the whole Israelite community at Kadesh in the wilderness of Paran, and they made their report to them and to the whole community, as they showed them the fruit of the land.
This is what they told him: “We came to the land you sent us to; it does indeed flow with milk and honey, and this is its fruit.
However, the people who inhabit the country are powerful, and the cities are fortified and very large; moreover, we saw the Anakites there.
Amalekites dwell in the Negeb region; Hittites, Jebusites, and Amorites inhabit the hill country; and Canaanites dwell by the Sea and along the Jordan.”
Caleb hushed the people before Moses and said, “Let us by all means go up, and we shall gain possession of it, for we shall surely overcome it.”
But the other men who had gone up with him said, “We cannot attack that people, for it is stronger than we.”
Thus they spread calumnies among the Israelites about the land they had scouted, saying, “The country that we traversed and scouted is one that devours its settlers. All the people that we saw in it are of astonishingly great size;
we saw the NephilimeNephilim See Gen. 6.4. there—the Anakites are part of the Nephilim—and we looked like grasshoppers to ourselves, and so we must have looked to them.”