3 So Moses/I did what Yahweh commanded him/me. He/I sent out twelve Israeli men who were all leaders of their tribes. He/I sent them from their/our camp at Paran in the desert. 4 These are the names of the men and the tribes they belonged to:
17 Before Moses/I sent them to explore Canaan, he/I said to them, “Go through the southern part of Canaan, and then go north into the hilly area. 18 See what the land is like. See if the people who live there are strong or weak. See if there are many people or only a few people. 19 Find out what kind of land they live in [RHQ]. Is it good or bad? Find out about the towns in which they live [RHQ]. Do they have walls around them or not? 20 Find out about the soil [RHQ]. Is it ◄fertile/good for growing crops► or not? Find out if there are trees there [RHQ]. Try to bring back some of the fruit that grows in that land.” He/I said that because it was the beginning of the time to harvest grapes.
21 So those men went to Canaan. They went through the entire land, from the Zin desert in the south all the way to Rehob town near Lebo-Hamath in the north. 22 In the south, they went to Hebron, where Ahiman, Sheshai, and Talmai, huge men descended from Anak, lived. Hebron was a city that was built seven years before Zoan city was built in Egypt. 23 In one valley, they cut from a grapevine one cluster of grapes. Because it was very large, they needed two men to carry it on a pole. They also picked some pomegranates and some figs to carry back to their camp. 24 They called that place Eshcol which means ‘cluster’ because they had cut that huge cluster of grapes there. 25 After they explored the land for 40 days, they returned to their camp.
30 When they said that, the people were afraid and started to cry out very loudly. But Caleb told the people who were standing near Moses/me to be quiet. Then he said, “We should go there and take the land, because we are certainly able to conquer it!”
31 But the men who had gone with him said, “No, we cannot attack and defeat those people! They are much stronger than we are!” 32 So those men gave to the Israeli people a bad report about the land that they had explored. They said, “The land that we explored is very large; we cannot conquer it. And all the people whom we saw are very tall. 33 We even saw the descendants of Nephili there. The descendants of Anak whom we saw there are descended from the giant Nephili people. When we saw them, we felt as small as grasshoppers [SIM], and they thought that we looked like grasshoppers too!”
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