Numbers 13

1Yahweh said to Moses,

2“Send men to explore the land of Canaan, which I am giving to the Israelites. From each ancestral tribe send one man, each one a leader among them.”

3So at Yahweh’s command Moses sent them out from the wilderness of Paran. All of them were leading men among the Israelites.

4These were their names: from the tribe of Reuben, Shammua son of Zaccur;

5from the tribe of Simeon, Shaphat son of Hori;

6from the tribe of Judah, Caleb son of Jephunneh;

7from the tribe of Issachar, Igal son of Joseph;

8from the tribe of Ephraim, Hoshea son of Nun;

9from the tribe of Benjamin, Palti son of Raphu;

10from the tribe of Zebulun, Gaddiel son of Sodi;

11from the tribe of Joseph, that is, from the tribe of Manasseh, Gaddi son of Susi;

12from the tribe of Dan, Ammiel son of Gemalli;

13from the tribe of Asher, Sethur son of Michael;

14from the tribe of Naphtali, Nahbi son of Vophsi;

15from the tribe of Gad, Geuel son of Machi.

16These are the names of the men Moses sent to explore the land. And Moses gave Hoshea son of Nun the name Joshua.

17When Moses sent them to explore the land of Canaan, he said to them, “Go up this way into the Negev, and go up into the hill country.

18See what the land is like, and whether the people who live in it are strong or weak, few or many.

19See whether the land they live in is good or bad, and whether the towns they live in are open camps or fortified.

20See whether the land is rich or poor, and whether there are trees in it or not. Be courageous, and bring back some of the fruit of the land.” It was the season for the first ripe grapes.

21So they went up and explored the land from the wilderness of Zin as far as Rehob, near Lebo-hamath.

22They went up into the Negev and came to Hebron, where Ahiman, Sheshai, and Talmai, the descendants of Anak, lived. Hebron had been built seven years before Zoan in Egypt.

23When they came to the Valley of Eshcol, they cut off a branch with a single cluster of grapes, and two of them carried it on a pole between them. They also brought some pomegranates and figs.

24That place was called the Valley of Eshcol because of the cluster that the Israelites cut off there.

25At the end of forty days they returned from exploring the land.

26They came back to Moses and Aaron and the whole congregation of the Israelites in the wilderness of Paran, at Kadesh. They brought back a report to them and to the whole congregation and showed them the fruit of the land.

27They told Moses, “We went into the land where you sent us. It does flow with milk and honey, and this is its fruit.

28But the people who live in the land are strong, and the towns are fortified and very large. We even saw the descendants of Anak there.

29The Amalekites live in the land of the Negev; the Hittites, the Jebusites, and the Amorites live in the hill country; and the Canaanites live by the sea and along the Jordan.”

30Then Caleb quieted the people before Moses and said, “We should go up at once and take possession of it, for we can certainly conquer it.”

31But the men who had gone up with him said, “We cannot go up against those people, because they are stronger than we are.”

32So they spread among the Israelites a bad report about the land they had explored. They said, “The land we passed through to explore is a land that devours those who live in it. All the people we saw there are men of great size.

33We saw the Nephilim there—the descendants of Anak, who come from the Nephilim—and we seemed like grasshoppers in our own eyes, and that is how we looked to them.”