The Twelve Spies and the Refusal at Kadesh Barnea

The event

Barely more than a year after leaving Egypt, Israel stood at Kadesh Barnea on the southern edge of Canaan, ready, in theory, to enter the land God had promised Abraham centuries earlier. Moses sent twelve men, one from each tribe, to scout the land for forty days. All twelve agreed the land was extraordinary — they brought back a single cluster of grapes so large it had to be carried on a pole between two men — but ten of the twelve came back terrified of the land's fortified cities and powerful inhabitants, and their fear spread through the whole camp overnight.

Only two spies, Joshua and Caleb, urged Israel to trust God and go up at once. "The LORD is with us; do not fear them," Caleb insisted, but the congregation instead talked of stoning Moses and Aaron and even proposed choosing a new leader to take them back to Egypt. It is a sobering scene: a people who had watched the plagues fall on Egypt, walked through the parted sea, and heard God's own voice at Sinai, choosing unbelief over the promise at the very moment it was within reach.

God's judgment matched the crime: the generation twenty years old and up who had refused to enter the land would die in the wilderness over the next forty years — one year for each of the forty days the spies had spent scouting — with only Joshua and Caleb, of that generation, permitted to live to see Canaan. It is this single episode, more than any other, that turns what could have been a short journey from Egypt to the Promised Land into a full generation spent wandering, and the writer of Hebrews later holds it up as a direct warning against the danger of an unbelieving heart (Hebrews 3:7-19).

Dating

Numbers 10:11 dates Israel's departure from Sinai to the second year after the Exodus, and the spies were sent out not long afterward, placing this episode roughly one year after leaving Egypt on the early-date chronology (c. 1445-1444 BC), or correspondingly later under a late-date scheme.

Scripture references

• Numbers 13:1-14:45
• Deuteronomy 1:19-46