1Then the whole community lifted up their voices and cried out. The people wept that night.
2All the children of Israel complained against Moses and against Aaron. The whole community said to them, "If only we had died in the land of Egypt. Or if only we had died in this wilderness."
3"Why has the LORD brought us to this land, to fall by the sword? Our wives and our children will be taken as plunder. Would it not be better for us to go back to Egypt?"
4And they said to one another, "Let us choose a leader, and let us go back to Egypt."
5Then Moses and Aaron fell on their faces in front of all the gathered assembly of the children of Israel.
6Joshua the son of Nun and Caleb the son of Jephunneh, who were among those who had explored the land, tore their clothes.
7They spoke to all the company of the children of Israel and said, "The land we passed through and explored is an exceedingly good land."
8"If the LORD delights in us, then he will bring us into this land and give it to us, a land flowing with milk and honey."
9"Only do not rebel against the LORD, and do not be afraid of the people of the land, for they are bread for us. Their protection has gone from them, and the LORD is with us. Do not fear them."
10But the whole community said they should be stoned with stones. Then the glory of the LORD appeared in the tent of meeting before all the children of Israel.
11And the LORD said to Moses, "How long will this people provoke me? How long will it be before they believe me, after all the signs I have shown among them?"
12"I will strike them with the plague and drive them out, and I will make of you a nation greater and mightier than they are."
13And Moses said to the LORD, "Then the Egyptians will hear of it, for you brought this people up by your might from among them."
14"And they will tell it to the people who live in this land. They have heard that you, LORD, are among this people, that you, LORD, are seen face to face, that your cloud stands over them, and that you go before them in a pillar of cloud by day and in a pillar of fire by night."
15"Now if you kill all this people as one man, then the nations who have heard of your fame will say,"
16"'The LORD was not able to bring this people into the land he promised them with an oath, so he has killed them in the wilderness.'"
17"And now, I beg you, let the power of my Lord be great, just as you have said:"
18"'The LORD is slow to anger, and full of mercy, forgiving sin and wrongdoing. Yet he by no means clears the guilty, but punishes the sin of the fathers in the children to the third and fourth generation.'"
19"Pardon, I beg you, the sin of this people, according to the greatness of your mercy, and as you have forgiven this people from Egypt until now."
20And the LORD said, "I have pardoned them, as you asked."
21"But as surely as I live, all the earth shall be filled with the glory of the LORD."
22"None of those men who have seen my glory and my miracles, which I did in Egypt and in the wilderness, and who have tested me now these ten times and have not listened to my voice,"
23"surely they shall not see the land that I promised their fathers with an oath. None of those who provoked me shall see it."
24"But my servant Caleb had a different spirit in him, and he has followed me fully. Him I will bring into the land he went into, and his descendants shall possess it."
25(Now the Amalekites and the Canaanites lived in the valley.) "Tomorrow turn back and set out into the wilderness by the way of the Red Sea."
27"How long shall I put up with this evil community, who complain against me? I have heard the complaints of the children of Israel, which they make against me."
28"Say to them, 'As surely as I live, says the LORD, I will do to you the very thing you have spoken in my hearing.'"
29"Your dead bodies shall fall in this wilderness: all of you who were counted, the whole number of you from twenty years old and upward, who have complained against me."
30"You shall certainly not come into the land where I swore with an oath that you would live, except Caleb the son of Jephunneh and Joshua the son of Nun."
31"But your little ones, whom you said would be taken as plunder, them I will bring in, and they shall know the land you have despised."
32"But as for you, your dead bodies shall fall in this wilderness."
33"And your children shall wander in the wilderness forty years, and bear the weight of your unfaithfulness, until your dead bodies are gone in the wilderness."
34"You explored the land for forty days. So for each day, a year: for forty years you shall bear your sin, and you shall know my breach of promise."
35"I the LORD have spoken. I will surely do this to all this evil community who have gathered together against me. In this wilderness they shall be finished, and there they shall die."
36The men whom Moses sent to explore the land, who came back and made the whole community complain against him by spreading a bad report about the land,
37those men who brought the evil report about the land died by the plague before the LORD.
38But Joshua the son of Nun and Caleb the son of Jephunneh, who were among the men who went to explore the land, stayed alive.
39Moses told these words to all the children of Israel, and the people mourned deeply.
40They got up early in the morning and went up to the top of the mountain, saying, "Here we are. We will go up to the place the LORD has promised, for we have sinned."
41But Moses said, "Why are you now breaking the command of the LORD? It will not succeed."
42"Do not go up, for the LORD is not among you. If you do, you will be struck down by your enemies."
43"For the Amalekites and the Canaanites are there in front of you, and you will fall by the sword. Because you have turned away from the LORD, the LORD will not be with you."
44But they dared to go up to the hill top. Yet the ark of the covenant of the LORD, and Moses, did not leave the camp.
45Then the Amalekites came down, and the Canaanites who lived in that hill country, and they struck them and beat them down, as far as Hormah.