the desert, and faint away and die in the desert; but your children [1] shall possess the land.”
After pronouncing this sentence on the rebellious Israelites, the Lord struck dead[2] the ten spies who had excited them[3] to sedition. But Josue and Caleb were spared and blessed. In spite of the divine sentence “that they should not see the land”, the rebellious Israelites determined to enter at once. Moses warned them, saying: “Go not up, for the Lord is not with you; it shall not succeed prosperously with you”; and he remained with the ark in the camp, while they in their blindness [4] set out and were routed by the Amalekites and Chanaanites. After this the Israelites returned once more into the interior of the desert towards the Red Sea.
COMMENTARY.
The Justice, Mercy , and Wisdom of God. Almighty God had borne for a long time with the murmuring, refractory Israelites; but at last His divine patience was exhausted, and His justice demanded that they should be punished. The people of Israel were condemned to wander about the desert for forty years, and of the 600,000 fighting men who left Egypt, only two entered the Promised Land. But even while He punished, God showed mercy; for at the request of Moses He so far forgave the people that He did not destroy them. He excluded all those who were grown up from the Promised Land, which, however, He explicitly promised anew to the younger generation. By the wisdom of Divine Providence the forty years of wandering served this end, that the Israelites put aside all the heathen ideas and customs which they had imbibed in Egypt, and grew accustomed to the observance of the law of God and obedience to those whom He had placed over them, and were trained to be a valiant, warlike people.
The sins of the Israelites. In the story you have just heard the Israelites sinned against the First Commandment by their want of faith, hope, and charity. They sinned against the Second Commandment by
- ↑ Your children. God said explicitly that all those over twenty years of age (with the exception of Josue and Caleb) should die in the wilderness, and that only those who at this time wrere under twenty, should enter the Promised Land.
- ↑ Struck dead. They died a sudden and unforeseen death.
- ↑ Excited them. To believe that the land of Chanaan could not be conquered.
- ↑ Their blindness. It was against the command of God that the Israelites went into Chanaan to attack its inhabitants. They had refused to put their trust in God, and now they presumptuously trusted in their own strength and numbers, and acted as if they could very well dispense with the divine assistance. This was a formal defiance of God. The Chanaanites fell upon them and utterly defeated them.
