²⁸ Tell them:^[a] “By my life”—oracle of the Lord—“I will do to you just what I have heard you say. ²⁹ Here in the wilderness^(A) your dead bodies shall fall. Of all your men of twenty years or more, enrolled in your registration, who grumbled against me, ³⁰ not one of you shall enter the land where I solemnly swore to settle you, except Caleb, son of Jephunneh, and Joshua, son of Nun. ³¹ Your little ones, however, who you said would be taken as spoil, I will bring in, and they shall know the land you rejected.^{(B) 32} But as for you, your bodies shall fall here in the wilderness, ³³ while your children will wander for forty years, suffering for your infidelity, till the last of you lies dead in the wilderness.^{(C) 34} Corresponding to the number of days you spent reconnoitering the land—forty days—you shall bear your punishment one year for each day: forty years. Thus you will realize what it means to oppose me. ³⁵ I, the Lord, have spoken; and I will surely do this to this entire wicked community that conspired against me: here in the wilderness they shall come to their end and there they will die.”

³⁶ And the men whom Moses had sent to reconnoiter the land^(D) and who on returning had set the whole community grumbling against him by spreading discouraging reports about the land— ³⁷ these men who had spread discouraging reports about the land were struck down by the Lord and died. ³⁸ Only Joshua, son of Nun, and Caleb, son of Jephunneh, survived of all the men who had gone to reconnoiter the land.^(E)

The False Teachers. ^5 (A)I wish to remind you, although you know all things, that [the] Lord who once saved a people from the land of Egypt later destroyed those who did not believe.^[a]