Numbers: Faith, Law, and History

The Spies

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Pentateuch

Lesson: The Spies

Genre:

Track: 24

Dictation Name: RR181M24

Location/Venue:

Year:

Let us worship God. Serve the Lord with gladness. Come before His presence with singing. Enter into His gates with thanksgiving and into His courts with praise. Be thankful unto Him and bless His name, for the Lord is good. His mercy is everlasting and His truth endureth to all generations. Let us pray.

Our Father, teach us amidst all the haste and waste of this world, to be still, and to know that thou art God, that thou art He who dost reign, the creator of all things, the governor of all things, and the one who, in thy sovereign grace, has made us thy people for thy purpose and for thy glory. Teach us to rejoice in thee, to be mindful of how great and how rich thou art, that there is nothing too great nor too small for thee. Give us grace to take hands off our lives and to commit them into thy care. In Christ’s name. Amen.

Our scripture is Numbers 13:1-33. Our subject: The Spies. Numbers 13. “And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying, Send thou men, that they may search the land of Canaan, which I give unto the children of Israel: of every tribe of their fathers shall ye send a man, every one a ruler among them. And Moses by the commandment of the Lord sent them from the wilderness of Paran: all those men were heads of the children of Israel. And these were their names: of the tribe of Reuben, Shammua the son of Zaccur. Of the tribe of Simeon, Shaphat the son of Hori. Of the tribe of Judah, Caleb the son of Jephunneh. Of the tribe of Issachar, Igal the son of Joseph. Of the tribe of Ephraim, Oshea (whom we know better as Joshua) the son of Nun. Of the tribe of Benjamin, Palti the son of Raphu. Of the tribe of Zebulun, Gaddiel the son of Sodi. Of the tribe of Joseph, namely, of the tribe of Manasseh, Gaddi the son of Susi. Of the tribe of Dan, Ammiel the son of Gemalli. Of the tribe of Asher, Sethur the son of Michael. Of the tribe of Naphtali, Nahbi the son of Vophsi. Of the tribe of Gad, Geuel the son of Machi.

These are the names of the men which Moses sent to spy out the land. And Moses called Oshea the son of Nun Jehoshua. And Moses sent them to spy out the land of Canaan, and said unto them, Get you up this way southward, and go up into the mountain: and see the land, what it is, and the people that dwelleth therein, whether they be strong or weak, few or many; and what the land is that they dwell in, whether it be good or bad; and what cities they be that they dwell in, whether in tents, or in strong holds; and what the land is, whether it be fat or lean, whether there be wood therein, or not. And be ye of good courage, and bring of the fruit of the land. Now the time was the time of the firstripe grapes. So they went up, and searched the land from the wilderness of Zin unto Rehob, as men come to Hamath. And they ascended by the south, and came unto Hebron; where Ahiman, Sheshai, and Talmai, the children of Anak, were. (Now Hebron was built seven years before Zoan in Egypt.) And they came unto the brook of Eshcol, and cut down from thence a branch with one cluster of grapes, and they bare it between two upon a staff; and they brought of the pomegranates, and of the figs. The place was called the brook Eshcol, because of the cluster of grapes which the children of Israel cut down from thence. And they returned from searching of the land after forty days. And they went and came to Moses, and to Aaron, and to all the congregation of the children of Israel, unto the wilderness of Paran, to Kadesh; and brought back word unto them, and unto all the congregation, and shewed them the fruit of the land. And they told him, and said, We came unto the land whither thou sentest us, and surely it floweth with milk and honey; and this is the fruit of it. Nevertheless the people be strong that dwell in the land, and the cities are walled, and very great: and moreover we saw the children of Anak there. The Amalekites dwell in the land of the south: and the Hittites, and the Jebusites, and the Amorites, dwell in the mountains: and the Canaanites dwell by the sea, and by the coast of Jordan. And Caleb stilled the people before Moses, and said, Let us go up at once, and possess it; for we are well able to overcome it. But the men that went up with him said, We be not able to go up against the people; for they are stronger than we. And they brought up an evil report of the land which they had searched unto the children of Israel, saying, The land, through which we have gone to search it, is a land that eateth up the inhabitants thereof; and all the people that we saw in it are men of a great stature. And there we saw the giants, the sons of Anak, which come of the giants: and we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight.”

We have here another account of unbelief. As Israel approached the Promised Land, spies were sent in to spy out the land. Twelve men were chosen, one from each tribe. These spies were apparently divided into two groups. According to verses 17 and 22 and 23, some went by way of the south. In verse 21, it appears that some entered Canaan from the Wilderness of Sin, south of the Dead Sea and from there, to Hamath. Of the twelve spies, only two proved to be godly and faithful men; Caleb of the tribe of Judah, and Joshua, or Oshea, of the tribe of Ephraim. The other ten men were cowardly and faithless. There names, however, are very carefully recorded for us, and this we should think about. They are names of infamy, permanently recorded in the Bible to the end of time. They are a reminder to us that God forgets nothing. The Bible is not a record of simply sweetness and light.

Verses 3 and 17 tell us that by the commandment of the Lord, these spies were sent out. However, at this point, we are not told of an important fact that appears years later. Indeed, God did command this, but in Deuteronomy 1:20-46, Moses gives a more d3etailed account of the matter. There were three aspects to the decision to spy out Canaan. First, the people took the initiative. Their excuse in approaching Moses was that the mission of the spies would have, as its purpose, military strategy, to find out by what way we must go up. This was a lie to deceive Moses, and to cover up their fearfulness, and they had no stomach for an invasion, unless it would be a very easy one. They were concealing cowardice in the name of strategy.

The second, Moses took their reaction at face value. The saying pleased me well, he later stated. He was greatly encouraged by this seeming resolution and their readiness to face up to the responsibilities ahead of them.

Then third, God of course, knew the cowardice of the tribes, or clans. He commanded Moses to go ahead with the plan. By this means, God brought into the open Israel’s unbelief. In Watson’s words, “Always and everywhere, faithless means foolish. Faithless means cowardly.” A great and strong people can become foolish and cowardly, and lose all their resolution and power through faithlessness. Although the historical documents are fragmentary and contradictory, it was said of one ancient empire that the decision of enemies to attack and destroy it came when they saw the effete luxury and apparently homosexuality of its emperor. Watson was right. Courage and the willingness to make a stand are not genetic, but moral facts. Many a civilization has collapsed when its faith waned.

Canaan, at that time, was very different from the present Palestine. People who travel to Canaan to see the land in which Israel and our Lord lived don’t see it. It’s radically different. It was then in many areas, well wooded with extensive forests. Well watered and capable of supporting considerably populations through its farming and ranching.

A key area visited by the spies was Hebron, about twenty miles south of Jerusalem, and a very ancient center of civilization. Its antiquity is cited in verse 22. Hebron antedated{?} an ancient Egypt city. The names of the some of the peoples who lived in Canaan are given in verses 28 and 29. The Anakim are referred to in previous texts as a very tall people. The Amalekites were particularly vicious and militant people whom Israel had already encountered. There were various nations of Amalekites at that time. The Hittites are well known to scholars of ancient history. Their center was elsewhere but they were entrenched in Canaan also. The Jebusites held the Jerusalem area, while the words Amorites and Canaanites refer to the long standing peoples of the land. In verse 33, the reference to men of great stature, the Nephalim, means people of a giant race.

Now, such references were regarded as mythological, and cynics treated the Bible with contempt because it spoke of these very tall peoples, but that was before explorers encountered the giant Watusis of Africa. Then it did appear that there apparently were once many such peoples.

Caleb, who figures so prominently in this episode, is an interesting person in many ways. He is here referred to as a member of Judah clan, in fact, as one of the leaders of the clan. In Joshua 14:6 and 14, he is called a Kenezite, a clan related to Edom. The Kenezites were absorbed into the tribe of Judah. Thus, while Caleb’s Kenezite father was Jephunneh, Caleb is also listed as a son of Hezer and of Judah, a subclan he had been made a member of. Now this was a slap in the face to the people of Israel, a very obvious slap in the face, because of the two men who proved to be faithful, one of them was a foreigner, an Israelite by adoption. This is a very significant fact, and again and again throughout the Bible, we find that there are references, humbling references to the fact that key people in the history of redemption, were aliens. Of course, in the genealogy of our Lord, there are several such, most notably, Rahab, a Canaanite and a prostitute.

The reputation of Canaan in Antiquity was one of exceptional fertility. The Romans were the first to devastate it, and then the Turks completed the devastating of the whole of the Middle East. It’s hard for us to realize that in Antiquity, when it speaks of Canaan and Arabia as a wilderness, it was because it was so heavily forested. All that is gone now. It is described here in verse 27 as a land flowing with milk and honey, and that term is a symbol of peace and plenty. The honey could be date honey or wild bee honey, both were common, and a fertile, well-planted land with hills covered with wildflowers and shrubbery, wild honey was very plentiful. Milk meant, of course, dairies and also butter and cheese, very basic foods in Antiquity, in much of history, in fact. The Greeks used the term “milk and honey” also, and they described milk and honey as the food of the gods. Very often they used the word “nectar” for honey. So, the term is one common to the ancient world.

The report of the ten faithless spies had four aspects. First, they reported on the amazing fertility of the land. They brought back with them grapes, pomegranates and figs as evidence of the high quality of the farming products. We are told of one cluster of grapes on a single branch of a vine, which was carried on a staff by two men. Now, to the modern man, this sounds like hyperbole, and people I have heard them cite this in their cynicism with regard to the Bible, but it’s because they’re ignorant about farming. A common summer grape in California is the Thompson Seedless grape. It’s what is most sold in the markets, but as it appears in the markets, it is twice the size of any such Thompson Seedless grape we might grow in our gardens. By the process of girdling the branches, the grapes are force-fed into growing dramatically in size. The flavor of the ungirdled grapes is better, but for marketing purposes, girdled grapes alone will sell normally. When I was a boy, occasionally, and this was only among some of the old Armenians, a farmer would strip the vine of many bunches or clusters, a vine that was in his garden rather than out in the vineyard, and thereby, he would produce a bunch or a cluster of very great size, an enormous thing, which would be quite ornamental when it was carried in for some celebration. Such huge clusters now have no market value, so we do not see them. Smaller families, too now, limit the amount the consumer wants, but what is here described was something that was common in Antiquity and common in some parts of the world, in family grape arbors, at least until recently. At any rate, the products brought back by the spies were very impressive. They were a witness to the productivity of Canaan.

Then second, these faithless spies had another motive for bringing back so huge a bunch of grapes and so superior a kind of pomegranate and fig. They were saying, in effect, “ If you think these are big, wait until you see the size of the people.” Now, not all the people of Canaan were men of great stature, but this is what they stressed in order to intimidate the people even as they themselves had been. They reported, “And there we saw the giants, the sons of Anak, which come of the giants: and we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight.” Now this is very vivid imagery, and very deceptive. A man can step on and squash a grasshopper. There is no contest between them. This is exactly the intent of this image. It reflects the peoples’ cowardice. They still preferred slavery in Egypt to fighting for freedom. Being faithless, they were empty men. They wanted God to hand them Canaan, not to make them to go in and fight for it.

James Moffitt’s rendering of Jeremiah 2:5 is very telling. God declares through Jeremiah, “What did your fathers find wrong in men, that they went far from me, went after empty idols and became empty themselves?” So, when we pursue anything that is empty, we make ourselves empty. Men who self-consciously choose evil have a strength for a time, but men who are lukewarm and pharisaical are marked by impotence, and this is our problem as a people today. We are lukewarm people, and therefore, we are increasingly impotent.

Third, there is a strange statement in verse 32. “The land through which we have gone to search it, is a land that eateth up the inhabitants thereof.” Now scholars have puzzled over the meaning of that. It was deliberately intended to be vague. James Moffett renders it as a land that starves its inhabitants to death, but this is a paraphrase and it does not jive with the description of Canaan as a land flowing with milk and honey. The literal reading is that the land eats up its inhabitants, and the question is what does this mean? This means, according to Wenam{?} that people tend to die due to the hostile environment, but this was a false report, and the laws of Deuteronomy 19:16-21 later summarize the penalty for false reports. In Numbers 14:37 we read that these ten cowardly spies died of a plague as a judgment for their cowardly report. So, too, did all the people other than Joshua and Caleb before the entry into Canaan. The death they feared in Canaan, they met in the desert.

According to Marsing{?}, another scholar, the reference to the land eating up its inhabitants, can and probably refers generally to war, disasters, infectious diseases, anything. In other words, they gave a vague report implying that it’s a place of epidemics, of wars, of whatever, to frighten the people.

Then fourth, in verse 28, we read that the spies reported that the walled cities were impregnable. There was no possibility of anything but defeat. It would be, therefore, unwise, they said, to think of any kind of assault on Canaan. Defeatism was written into the minds of the ten spies as well as cowardice, and they refused to prevent anyone from believing otherwise. They left no option except retreat. To fight was out of the question as far as they were concerned. At every stage of their deliverance, Israel had been presented with miraculous answers. They apparently now wanted more miracles. No miracles, no move on their part. This was faithlessness, and it asked for God’s judgment.

Caleb had another report, a very brief one, and Caleb stilled the people before Moses and said, “Let us go up at once and possess it, for we are well able to overcome it.” The response of the ten faithless spies was, literally, in verse 32, an “evil report.” Now we have that same expression in Proverbs 10:18, and there it is rendered a bit more literally, “uttering a slander.” In other words, they were lying. They were slandering the God who delivered them and had led them. In Numbers 10:9, God had promised them, “And if ye go to war in your land against the enemy that oppresseth you, then ye shall blow an alarm with the trumpets; and ye shall be remembered before the Lord your God, and ye shall be saved from your enemies.” God thus promised to bless Israel with success in any war conducted in terms of His law or at His commandment. All this meant nothing to the people. Forty days had been spent by the spies, in Canaan. Apparently, during that time, only Caleb and Joshua thought in terms of military strategy. The others reacted with fear.

Now, archeological research of Canaanite sites of that era indicate that the fearful spies were correct about the strong fortifications of that age, but fortifications and armament are not everything. The spies had left out the degenerating moral of these peoples and even more, the power of God. We must remember that the land of Canaan had been a highly desirable prize. The Hittites for awhile had possessed it, and there were still Hittite enclaves there. The Egyptians then had been overlords of it, but the Egyptian power had just been broken by God himself, so here were a people who had been used to being ruled by others, and a people with a strong morale could have conquered them.

God had commanded that Moses agree to the spying venture. It was a test of the people’s faith. They obviously preferred to be ruled by the fear of man rather than the fear of God, and this is a mark of the slave mentality. The world is always full of difficulties, and it is foolish to hope otherwise. We must see all difficulties in terms of God law and government, His sovereign purpose. The twelve spies were clan leaders, not necessarily the head men by any means, but important men. They were thus in the main fairly representative of Israel, whereas, Caleb and Joshua were not. What Israel demonstrated was not a religious fear but an ungodly fear, a fear of man, not a fear of God. With this episode, Israel’s opportunity to enter Canaan in that generation ended. They had proven themselves to be true slaves, not God’s free man, and they were shortly thereafter sentenced to die in the wilderness. Their unbelief was a rebellion against God in the form of revolution. History is a long account of man’s revolution against God and God’s law, and God cannot lose in this war, nor can man win. Let us pray.

Our Father, we thank thee for thy word, and we pray that as we face the troubles and disasters of our time, we may do so not in the fear of man, but in fear of thee and in obedience to thee by faith. Grant us this we beseech thee. In Christ’s name. Amen. Are there any questions now concerning our lesson? Yes?

[Audience] Isn’t it astonishing that {?} fire and all the other evidences that they continued to rebel?

[Rushdoony] Yes, it is. I think we can speak of the miracle of unbelief. It’s amazing how people refuse to believe against very, very obvious facts of their own life and experience, and certainly in this instance, their history was hardly a commendable one. Some of the rabbis have called attention to that in their accounts, but many have made excuses. Any other questions or comments? This, like many other episodes in Numbers, is now not as well known as it once was. It’s one of the best known episodes of Old Testament history, but this was often used by pastors in the Colonial Era to encourage the people, and to strengthen them against whatever they had to face, to remind them it was not to be the fear of man, nor of anything in nature, but the fear of God that had to govern them. That type of preaching helped make this country strong. Well, if there are no further questions, let us . . . Yes?

[Audience] Earlier in the sermon you had mentioned that God does not forget and I agree that He does not forget anything, but He chooses to forget our sin and does not hold that against us in grace.

[Rushdoony] Very good point, and God says of His people, the redeemed, that He will blot out all our sins and transgressions and then in eternity He will remember them no more. So, with our resurrection, we not only have a new body and a new and eternal life, but the very memory is blotted out of all our sins and transgressions, but God makes clear when He records the names of these people, You did not remember my mercy and my grace, and therefore, you shall be remembered for your infamy.

Well, let us conclude now with prayer.

Our Father, we thank thee for thy word. We pray that thy people, turning to thy word, may grow in grace and in understanding, may come to a saving knowledge of thee, might be fearless as they face the evils, the burdens, the problems of our time, and that they may be more than conquerors in Christ. And now, go in peace. God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost bless you and keep you, guide and protect you this day and always. Amen.

End of tape