Numbers 13:32

13:32 Then they presented the Israelites with a discouraging ¹  report of the land they had investigated, saying, “The land that we passed through ²  to investigate is a land that devours ³  its inhabitants. ⁴  All the people we saw there ⁵  are of great stature.

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¹ tn Or “an evil report,” i.e., one that was a defamation of the grace of God.

² tn Heb “which we passed over in it”; the pronoun on the preposition serves as a resumptive pronoun for the relative, and need not be translated literally.

³ tn The verb is the feminine singular participle from אָכַל (’akhal); it modifies the land as a “devouring land,” a bold figure for the difficulty of living in the place.

⁴ sn The expression has been interpreted in a number of ways by commentators, such as that the land was infertile, that the Canaanites were cannibals, that it was a land filled with warlike dissensions, or that it denotes a land geared for battle. It may be that they intended the land to seem infertile and insecure.

⁵ tn Heb “in its midst.”