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32 Then they presented the Israelites with a discouraging report[a] of the land they had investigated, saying, “The land that we passed through[b] to investigate is a land that devours[c] its inhabitants.[d] All the people we saw there[e] are of great stature.

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Footnotes

  1. Numbers 13:32 tn Or “an evil report,” i.e., one that was a defamation of the grace of God.
  2. Numbers 13:32 tn Heb “which we passed over in it”; the pronoun on the preposition serves as a resumptive pronoun for the relative, and need not be translated literally.
  3. Numbers 13:32 tn The verb is the feminine singular participle from אָכַל (ʾakhal); it modifies the land as a “devouring land,” a bold figure for the difficulty of living in the place.
  4. Numbers 13:32 sn The expression has been interpreted in a number of ways by commentators, such as that the land was infertile, that the Canaanites were cannibals, that it was a land filled with warlike dissensions, or that it denotes a land geared for battle. It may be that they intended the land to seem infertile and insecure.
  5. Numbers 13:32 tn Heb “in its midst.”