Scouting Out Canaan

13 The Lord spoke to Moses: ² “Send men to scout out the land of Canaan^(A) I am giving to the Israelites. Send one man who is a leader among them from each of their ancestral tribes.” ³ Moses sent them from the Wilderness of Paran at the Lord’s command. All the men were leaders in Israel.^(B)

³² So they gave a negative report to the Israelites about the land they had scouted: “The land we passed through to explore is one that devours its inhabitants, and all the people we saw in it are men of great size. ³³ We even saw the Nephilim^(A) there—the descendants of Anak come from the Nephilim!^(B) To ourselves we seemed like grasshoppers, and we must have seemed the same to them.”

²² “Then^(A) all of you approached me and said, ‘Let’s send men ahead of us, so that they may explore the land for us and bring us back a report about the route we should go up and the cities we will come to.’ ²³ The plan seemed good to me, so I selected twelve men from among you, one man for each tribe. ²⁴ They left and went up into the hill country and came to Eshcol Valley, scouting the land. ²⁵ They took some of the fruit from the land in their hands, carried it down to us, and brought us back a report: ‘The land the Lord our God is giving us is good.’^(B)

²⁶ “But you were not willing to go up. You rebelled against the command of the Lord your God. ²⁷ You grumbled in your tents^(C) and said, ‘The Lord brought us out of the land of Egypt to hand us over to the Amorites in order to destroy us, because he hates us. ²⁸ Where can we go? Our brothers have made us lose heart,^[a](D) saying: The people are larger and taller than we are; the cities are large, fortified to the heavens.^(E) We also saw the descendants of the Anakim^(F) there.’