Numbers 13:2 — shelach lekha, ‘send for yourself’, and the two Bibles that disagree about whose idea this was

The chapter opens with a two-letter word that has carried an enormous amount of argument. God tells Moses shelach LEKHA — literally send for yourself. The lekha is a dative pronoun with no ordinary work to do in the sentence: the verb needs no object, and dropping the word changes nothing about who sends whom. Hebrew uses this construction to throw the action back on the person doing it, and the most famous instance of it in the Bible is the one this project has already translated — lech lekha to Abram, rendered on these pages as ‘Go — you yourself —’ (Genesis 12:1, already on these pages). This chapter gets the same treatment and its own note.

⚠ Why the word matters here more than anywhere else. Read it as a plain command and this is God’s mission. Read the dative as permissive — send, if you want to; on your own responsibility — and it is not. And that distinction is not an idle one, because Deuteronomy tells this story the other way round.

In this chapter God says ‘send.’ In Deuteronomy 1:22 (already on these pages) Moses says: all of you came near to me and said, let us send men ahead of us — the mission is the people’s idea, and Moses merely agrees to it (‘the thing was good in my eyes’). That chapter’s own note on these pages calls this ‘the sharpest difference between this retelling and Numbers,’ reports both framings, and adopts neither. Nothing here changes that. ⚠ But it is worth naming that Rashi reads the harmonisation straight out of this verse’s grammar: shelach lekha means ‘according to your own judgement — I do not command you; if you wish to, send them’ — and he then cites Deuteronomy 1:22 by name as what prompted it (Sotah 34b). It is one of the neatest pieces of harmonising in the classical commentaries, and it lives entirely in a preposition. Whether the preposition can carry that much weight is exactly the open question; the reading is reported here with its pedigree, and no vote is taken.

⚠ On the shelf, one version renders the dative and the rest do not. NWT 1984 alone reads ‘Send out FOR YOURSELF men’. KJV and ASV print ‘Send thou men’, which puts the stress on the subject rather than the dative — and the Spanish shelf does the same thing, the RV60 and the Reina-Valera antigua both reading ‘Envía TÚ hombres’. NIV (‘Send some men’) and NVI (‘Envía a algunos de tus hombres’) drop it altogether. A reader of those last two cannot see the word the whole argument rests on.

And one more thing about where this chapter sits. Rashi opens on a different question — why the spies follow immediately after Miriam’s punishment — and answers that the juxtaposition is the point: she was disciplined for what she said about her brother, and these men watched it happen and learned nothing (Midrash Tanchuma). Whatever one makes of that as exegesis, the two chapters really are joined by a word. Miriam’s offence and the spies’ offence are both dibbah-shaped: Numbers 12 is a bad report about a man, and v32 here is a bad report about a land.

Al pi Jehovah in v3 — ‘at the command of Jehovah’, this translation’s standing rendering (Numbers 9, already on these pages, where it runs seven times in six verses) — is literally ‘at the MOUTH of Jehovah’, one chapter after the mouth-to-mouth of Numbers 12:8.

Numbers 13:4-15 — twelve names, ten of which are never named again

A list, and this project’s practice with lists is one grouped note rather than twelve small ones: the repeating formula IS the content. ⚠ What is worth stopping on is the arithmetic. Twelve men are named. Two of them — Caleb and Hoshea/Joshua — survive the next chapter’s verdict and enter the land forty years later. The other ten are never named again anywhere in the Bible (Numbers 14 accounts for them, but as a group, not by name). Every name here is a man at the top of his tribe (each is a chieftain, the same title Numbers 1 and Numbers 7 gave the twelve who ran the census and brought the dedication offerings, both already on these pages), and ten of twelve are about to become anonymous.

This is a third tribal order, and the book now has three. Numbers 2, 7 and 10 (all already on these pages) march the tribes in the camp order built around Judah, who goes first. Numbers 1’s census list starts with Reuben — and so does this one, sharing its first four exactly (Reuben, Simeon, Judah, Issachar) before going its own way: Ephraim moves up to fifth, Zebulun drops from fifth to seventh, Naphtali comes eleventh instead of last, and Gad falls to the end. The text never explains any of the three. And the roster is assembled the way it has to be once Levi is set apart: Levi is absent, and Joseph is split so the count still reaches twelve — Ephraim at v8, then v11’s doubled heading, ‘for the tribe of Joseph — for the tribe of Manasseh’, which is the text showing its own arithmetic.

Several of the names carry God in them — Gaddiel and Ammiel and Geuel end in -el, and Michael, ‘who is like God?’, is here as a father’s name centuries before the archangel. Sethur, by contrast, is built on satar, to hide or conceal. The text draws no conclusion from any of it and neither does this translation; a name is not a verdict.

Numbers 13:16 — Hoshea becomes Joshua, five chapters after the Bible started calling him Joshua

Moses renames one member of the delegation. Hoshea (Hoshea, from yasha, to save) means something like ‘he saves’ or ‘salvation’. Joshua (Yehoshua) is the same root with the divine name folded into the front: Jehovah saves. A man is given the sentence that will be the point of his whole career, at the moment he is sent to look at the land he will one day be the one to take.

⚠ And the Bible has already called him Joshua in five chapters. He is Joshua when he fights Amalek at Exodus 17:9; Joshua going up the mountain as Moses’ minister at Exodus 24:13; Joshua mishearing the golden calf as the noise of a battle at Exodus 32:17; Joshua as the attendant who will not leave the tent at Exodus 33:11; and Joshua when he asks Moses to silence Eldad and Medad at Numbers 11:28 — all already on these pages, all before the verse that says he was called Hoshea. Exodus 17’s own note flagged this when it shipped, and said the honest thing: the Torah is not consistent about when the switch happens, and it is either a narrator writing with hindsight or a text harmonised forward. What this verse adds is the only piece of information the earlier chapters lacked — the name he had before.

⚠ The shelf splits on whether to transliterate the Hebrew or the Greek. KJV prints ‘And Moses called Oshea the son of Nun Jehoshua’, keeping both names in their Hebrew shapes and making the change visible; ASV, NIV and NWT use the familiar ‘Hoshea’/‘Joshua’. The Spanish shelf all uses the same two names, though not the same sentence: RV60 and the Reina-Valera antigua read ‘a Oseas hijo de Nun le puso Moisés el nombre de Josué’, while NVI rewrites it as ‘Moisés le cambió el nombre y le puso Josué’. And in Spanish the family resemblance to Jesús, the Greek form of this same name, is closer to the surface than English can manage.

Numbers 13:17-20 — six questions, and the one instruction that is not a question

Moses’ briefing is a questionnaire, and it is a soldier’s. Six paired alternatives, each asking the scouts to settle a binary: the people — strong or slack; few or many; the land — good or bad; the cities — open camps or strongholds; the soil — fat or lean; and trees — is there a tree in it or not. Nothing in the list asks for an opinion. Every item has an answer.

⚠ Then one instruction breaks the pattern: ve-hitchazzaqtem, be strong — and it is the same root, chazaq, that the questionnaire has just used of the enemy (‘whether they are STRONG or slack’, v18). Moses asks them to find out how strong the people are and, in the same breath, to be strong themselves. The report they bring back in v31 answers the wrong one: they are stronger than we.

The chapter then drops in a seasonal detail that quietly dates everything: the days were the days of the first ripe grapes — roughly midsummer, July or so. It is there to explain the cluster in v23, and it also means the forty days of scouting run through the hottest, driest weeks of the year, which is when a land looks its worst.

Numbers 13:21-24 — Hebron, Zoan, and a bunch of grapes carried by two men

The route is enormous: from the wilderness of Zin as far as Rehob, at Lebo-hamath — the southern desert to the far north, the whole length of the land, in forty days. Whether that is a realistic itinerary or a summary the text does not say. ⚠ And the last two words are themselves an open question. Levo Chamat can be read as ordinary Hebrew, ‘to the entrance of Hamath’, or as a place-name, Lebo-hamath — and the shelf splits the same way in both languages, with the older versions taking the phrase and the two modern ones taking the name. KJV ‘as men come to Hamath’, ASV ‘to the entrance of Hamath’, NWT 1984 ‘to the entering in of Ha’math’, RV60 and the Reina-Valera antigua ‘entrando en Hamat’; against NIV ‘toward Lebo Hamath’ and NVI ‘cerca de Lebó Jamat’. This translation goes with the minority. The argument for the name is that the l behaves as part of the word rather than as the preposition, and that the border lists this phrase belongs to otherwise contain nothing but place-names. It is probably the town at modern Lebweh, north of Baalbek in the Beqaa, though that identification is not secure.

⚠ Verse 22 does something odd in the Hebrew that most versions tidy away: it goes singular. ‘And they went up into the Negev, and HE came to Hebron’ — va-yavo, third person singular, in the middle of a plural march. The change is kept here. Ancient and modern readers have taken it as a scribal slip, as a distributive (‘each one came’), or as a trace of a version of the story in which one man went to Hebron — and the natural candidate is Caleb, since Hebron is the town he is later granted (Joshua 14, not yet on these pages). The text does not say.

⚠ ‘Now Hebron was built seven years before Zoan in Egypt.’ A parenthesis with no visible purpose, dating one town against another that the reader is expected to know better — Zoan is Tanis, in the Nile delta. It is the kind of note a writer makes for an audience that lives in Egypt or has just left it, and it is one of the small chronological anchors the Torah drops without explanation. Hebron is already on these pages as the place Abraham settles and buys a burial cave; its other name, Kiriath-arba, means ‘town of Arba’ — and Arba, the tradition holds, was one of the Anakim. ⚠ A small thing this translation keeps and most versions drop: the Hebrew says ha-Anak, THE Anak, with the definite article, here and again at v28. A personal name does not normally take one, so the article suggests a clan or a title rather than a man — which is why these verses read ‘the offspring of the Anak’ rather than ‘of Anak’.

The cluster. They cut a single eshkol — one cluster of grapes — and carry it on a pole between two. And the place takes its name from the fruit: Nachal Eshkol, the Wadi of the Cluster. This translation puts the meaning in the line rather than the footnote, as it does with every name-pun. ⚠ Note what the detail is doing, because the chapter is about to turn: the single strongest piece of evidence for the land is a physical object heavy enough to need two men, and they carry it the whole way home, and it changes nobody’s mind.

Numbers 13:25-29 — ‘Only’: the one word that turns the report

Forty days out, forty days back — a number about to become a sentence: forty days of scouting will cost forty years of wandering (Numbers 14, already on these pages).

They report to the whole assembly, not privately to Moses, and they begin with the truth: we came to the land where you sent us, and it does indeed flow with milk and honey — and this is its fruit. They have the evidence in their hands.

⚠ Then verse 28 opens with efes ki. Efes is a noun meaning a cessation, an end, a nothing — in modern Hebrew it is the word for zero — and used as a conjunction it means something like except that, only, nothing but. It is a stronger, more absolute word than the ordinary ‘but’. Everything before it is true and everything before it stops mattering. This translation leaves it standing alone with a dash rather than smoothing it into ‘however’. KJV has the wonderful old ‘Howbeit’; NIV flattens it to ‘But’.

What follows is not a lie. The cities WERE fortified; the Anakim WERE there; the census of Numbers 1 counted an army that had never fought a siege. Verse 29 is a competent intelligence summary, laid out by terrain: Amalek in the Negev, three peoples in the hill country, the Canaanite on the coast and along the Jordan. ⚠ Nothing has been said yet that is false. Keep that in view when v32 arrives.

Numbers 13:30-31 — Caleb hushes the crowd, and one Hebrew word decides who is stronger than whom

Va-yahas — Caleb hushed the people. The verb is onomatopoeic, the Hebrew equivalent of shushing a room, and it tells you the room was already loud: between verse 29 and verse 30, without a word of narration, the assembly has started shouting.

His answer is built out of two doubled verbs, the construction Hebrew uses for emphasis and English has no clean equivalent for: aloh na’aleh (going up we will go up) and yakhol nukhal (being able we are able). Rendered here as ‘let us go up — go up now —’ and ‘we are surely able’. He does not dispute a single fact in the report. He disputes the conclusion.

⚠ And verse 31 ends on a genuinely ambiguous word. ‘They are stronger than mimmennu’ — which in Hebrew can mean than we or than he. KJV, ASV, NIV, NWT, Douay, Geneva, RV60, NVI and the antigua all read ‘than we’ and so does this translation, because that is the plain sense in context. But the Talmud records the other reading, and it is chilling. Rabbi Chanina bar Pappa: do not read it ‘stronger than us’ but ‘stronger than HIM’ — the scouts saying, as it were, that even the owner cannot get his own property out, which the passage then calls heresy outright (Sotah 35a). The consonants permit it. Nothing else in the chapter demands it, and this translation does not adopt it; it is noted because the ambiguity is real and a reader of the English cannot see it.

Numbers 13:32-33 — a land that eats its inhabitants, the Nephilim, and how the spies knew what the giants thought

Now the report changes category. Dibbah is not a word for news; it is the word for a whispering campaign, defamation, a report put about. The Bible has used it before on these pages of Joseph bringing his father his brothers’ dibbah (Genesis 37:2) — where, as that chapter’s note observes, the text pointedly declines to say whether it was true. ⚠ NVI decides that question here, translating ‘falsos rumores’, false rumours; the Hebrew says only that it was dibbah. KJV, Geneva and ASV all have ‘an evil report’; NWT and NIV ‘a bad report’; the Reina-Valera antigua uses the splendid verb vituperaron.

‘A land that eats up its inhabitants.’ The first thing they say is a flat contradiction of the second thing they said forty days ago. It also contradicts the object they are holding.

⚠ The Nephilim. This verse and Genesis 6:4 are the entire record of the word in the Hebrew Bible — and it occurs twice inside this one verse, so two verses hold all three occurrences. Genesis 6:4 reads ‘the Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and afterward too’, and that chapter’s note on these pages said the word recurs in exactly one more verse. This is it. Its meaning is unknown; the Greek translators wrote gigantes, giants, and the whole later tradition of giants descends from that choice. This translation transliterates in both places, as Genesis 6 does, so a reader can see it is one word. On the shelf, ASV, NIV and NWT keep ‘Nephilim’; KJV and Geneva print ‘giants’; the Spanish shelf splits the same way the English one does. The Reina-Valera family follows the Greek — RV60 and the antigua both read ‘gigantes, hijos de Anac, raza de los gigantes’ — and the NVI goes furthest, collapsing the whole clause into ‘los gigantes anaquitas’, in which the word Nephilim does not survive at all. But the TNM transliterates, ‘los nefilim, los hijos de Anac, que vienen de los nefilim’ — the same choice made here, and one more instance of the pattern this project keeps reporting.

⚠ And then the last five words, which are the most interesting words in the chapter. ‘And in our own eyes we were like grasshoppers’ — fair enough; a man may report his own fear. ‘And so we were in their eyes.’ How would they know? Nobody in the chapter has spoken to a giant. The scouts have moved from what they saw, to how they felt, to a claim about the inside of someone else’s head — and the Hebrew makes it a statement of fact, not a guess. Rashi, characteristically, supplies the missing evidence rather than the criticism: he says they overheard the Anakim saying to one another that there were ants in the vineyards that looked like people (Sotah 35a). ⚠ The Douay-Rheims simply removes the difficulty — its verse reads ‘in comparison of whom, we seemed like locusts’ and the second clause is gone, one of the clearer places on this shelf where the Latin tradition resolved a hard sentence by dropping half of it.

Chagav, the grasshopper, has one quiet joke in it: it is on the short list of insects Leviticus 11:22 (already on these pages) permits Israel to EAT. The men who have just described a land that eats its inhabitants compare themselves to something edible.