Discovery BoxNumbers 13:32 
Context13:32 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.
Numbers 21:22
Context21:22 “Let us 6 pass through your land; 7 we will not turn aside into the fields or into the vineyards, nor will we drink water from any well, but we will go along the King’s Highway until we pass your borders.”
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.”
6 tn The Hebrew text uses the singular in these verses to match the reference to “Israel.”
7 tc Smr has “by the King’s way I will go. I will not turn aside to the right or the left.”
