The LORD said to Moses [in the desert of Paran,] “Send men to reconnoiter the land of Canaan, which I am giving to the Israelites. You shall send one man from each ancestral tribe, all of them princes.”
After reconnoitering the land for forty days they returned,
met Moses and Aaron and the whole community of the Israelites in the desert of Paran at Kadesh, made a report to them all, and showed them the fruit of the country.
They told Moses: “We went into the land to which you sent us. It does indeed flow with milk and honey, and here is its fruit.
However, the people who are living in the land are fierce, and the towns are fortified and very strong. Besides, we saw descendants of the Anakim there.
Amalekites live in the region of the Negeb; Hittites, Jebusites and Amorites dwell in the highlands, and Canaanites along the seacoast and the banks of the Jordan.”
Caleb, however, to quiet the people toward Moses, said, “We ought to go up and seize the land, for we can certainly do so.”
But the men who had gone up with him said, “We cannot attack these people; they are too strong for us.”
So they spread discouraging reports among the Israelites about the land they had scouted, saying, “The land that we explored is a country that consumes its inhabitants. And all the people we saw there are huge men,
veritable giants (the Anakim were a race of giants); we felt like mere grasshoppers, and so we must have seemed to them.”
At this, the whole community broke out with loud cries, and even in the night the people wailed.
The LORD also said to Moses and Aaron: “How long will this wicked community grumble against me? I have heard the grumblings of the Israelites against me.
Tell them: By my life, says the LORD, I will do to you just what I have heard you say.
Here in the desert shall your dead bodies fall. Of all your men of twenty years or more, registered in the census, who grumbled against me,
Forty days you spent in scouting the land; forty years shall you suffer for your crimes: one year for each day. Thus you will realize what it means to oppose me.
I, the LORD, have sworn to do this to all this wicked community that conspired against me: here in the desert they shall die to the last man.”
Roman Catholic Ordinary Calendar – rosary,team