Numbers 13 Summary and Study Guide

“And we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight.” Ten men said that about themselves after walking the length of Canaan with its fruit on their shoulders. This Numbers 13 summary and study guide takes the forty days that produced that sentence.

Setting the Stage

God promised Abraham’s descendants a land of their own (Genesis 12:7), and centuries later He said the same thing to Moses out of a burning bush: He would bring Israel up out of Egypt into a good and large land, one flowing with milk and honey (Exodus 3:8). That promise carried them through the sea, through the year at Sinai, and across the desert.

By Numbers 13 the nation has been counted, camped by tribe and set in marching order, and it now sits at Kadesh in the wilderness of Paran, one march from the border. Moses has already told them to go up and possess the land (Deuteronomy 1:21). Nothing stands between Israel and the promise except the decision they are about to make.

Comprehensive Numbers 13 Summary

The LORD tells Moses to send men to search the land of Canaan, and He calls it a land He is already giving to Israel. Moses picks one leader from each tribe, twelve in all, and the roster closes with him giving one of them a new name, Jehoshua in place of Oshea. He sends them up through the dry southern country into the hill country with six questions to answer, one instruction to be courageous, and one errand: bring back some of the fruit. It is grape season.

They cover the whole land, from the wilderness of Zin in the south to Rehob in the far north. At Hebron they see Ahiman, Sheshai and Talmai, the sons of Anak. At a valley they name Eshcol they cut down a single cluster of grapes and sling it on a staff between two of them, and they gather pomegranates and figs.

Forty days later they come back to Kadesh and report in front of the whole nation. Their first sentence proves God right. The land flows with milk and honey, and here is the fruit.

Then comes a single word, nevertheless. The people are strong, the cities are walled, the sons of Anak are there, and every region is already occupied.

Caleb silences the people and says Israel should go up at once and take the land, because they are well able to overcome it. The other ten answer that Israel is not able, and they spread a report about the land that Scripture later calls a slander.

One Word Summary

• Report: the whole mission exists to produce one, and Scripture calls the report they brought evil
• Nevertheless: the ten grant every word God said about the land and refuse Him anyway
• Sight: what each man looked at decided what he said

In One Sentence

Moses sent twelve leaders to search Canaan, and after forty days they came back holding its fruit and disagreeing about its God, with Caleb saying Israel was well able to take the land and the other ten saying it could not be done.

Theme of Numbers 13

Numbers 13 is about faith and sight weighing the same evidence. Twelve men saw the same walls, the same men and the same grapes, and the difference between their reports came down to whether they counted God at all. Two supporting ideas run alongside that one.

God’s promise was settled before the search ever began, since He called Canaan a land He was already giving away (verse 2). And words spoken by trusted leaders can carry a whole nation, for better or worse (verses 31 to 33).

Numbers 13 Outline

• Numbers 13:1-3: The LORD tells Moses to send one leader from every tribe to search the land of Canaan.
• Numbers 13:4-16: The twelve men are named tribe by tribe, and Moses renames Oshea the son of Nun Jehoshua.
• Numbers 13:17-20: Moses sends them through the south country into the hill country with six questions and an errand to bring back fruit.
• Numbers 13:21-24: They search the land from Zin to Rehob, pass the sons of Anak at Hebron, and cut the great cluster at Eshcol.
• Numbers 13:25-27: After forty days they return to Kadesh with the fruit and tell the whole nation that the land flows with milk and honey.
• Numbers 13:28-29: The ten name strong people, walled cities, the sons of Anak, and hostile nations in every region of the land.
• Numbers 13:30: Caleb silences the people and calls Israel to go up at once and possess the land.
• Numbers 13:31-33: The other ten answer that Israel is not able, and spread an evil report of the land.

The Twelve Spies

Verses 4 to 16 are a formal roster, one man for every tribe. Levi is absent, because the Levites were to receive no territory of their own, and Joseph is counted as two tribes to keep the number at twelve. Two of these names carry through the rest of the Bible. The other ten are named here and then disappear, and Numbers 14:37 records why.

Observations from Numbers 13

God is never mentioned in the report of the ten (verses 27 to 29 and 31 to 33)

Their report runs six verses, broken in the middle by Caleb’s single sentence. It names the fruit, the people, the cities, the sons of Anak, the Amalekites, the Hittites, the Jebusites, the Amorites and the Canaanites, and it never once names the God who had promised them the place. The whole chapter uses the name LORD twice, both times in verses 1 and 3, where God is the one speaking. Caleb’s sentence in verse 30 does not name Him either, though his confidence is hard to account for without Him.

The giants stood at Hebron, where the patriarchs were buried (verse 22)

The field and cave at Machpelah, in Hebron, was the only ground in Canaan Abraham ever owned, bought and paid for in front of witnesses (Genesis 23:17-20). Abraham himself, Sarah, Isaac, Rebekah, Jacob and Leah were all buried there (Genesis 23:19; Genesis 49:31). Ten men walked past the one plot of Canaan their own family already held, and came home frightened of the men living on top of it.

The chapter keeps returning to what men look at (verses 18, 28, 32 and 33)

Moses says “see the land” (verse 18). The ten say “we saw the children of Anak” (verse 28), then “all the people that we saw in it” (verse 32), then “we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight” (verse 33), which means they thought of themselves as insects and assumed the Canaanites thought so too. The chapter opens with a command to look and ends with men looking at themselves.

Difficult Verses Explained

Did God command the spy mission, or did Israel ask for it?

Both, and Scripture records both without embarrassment. Numbers 13:1-2 has the LORD telling Moses to send the men. Moses’ own account forty years later fills in what came first: he had told Israel to go up and take the land, and “ye came near unto me every one of you, and said, We will send men before us, and they shall search us out the land” (Deuteronomy 1:22), which means the people asked for the mission themselves.

Moses approved the request, and Numbers 13 opens with God’s word authorising it. Ezekiel 20:6 adds that God had already searched the land out for them, so the survey told Him nothing He did not know and told Israel nothing He had not said.

What does “a land that eateth up the inhabitants thereof” mean?

Most commentators read it as a comment on how contested Canaan was: the land was good enough that rival peoples kept fighting over it, and the wars wasted whoever held it. A few read it as a claim about disease or barrenness, which sits badly with the fruit the same men were carrying.

Scripture leaves the geography open and settles the verdict: Numbers 14:36 calls the whole report “a slander upon the land.” And the answer to it comes one chapter later from the two men who had walked the same roads: the inhabitants “are bread for us” (Numbers 14:9), which means Israel would consume them, not the reverse.

How could the spies know how they looked to the Canaanites?

They could not, and the chapter records no Canaanite saying anything at all. “We were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight” (verse 33) begins with their own self-assessment and then puts it in the mouths of men who had not spoken.

A generation later Rahab tells Joshua’s two spies what the Canaanites had actually felt all along: “our hearts did melt, neither did there remain any more courage in any man” (Joshua 2:11), which means Jericho had been in terror of Israel since the day it heard about the Red Sea.

Isaiah later turns the same picture the other way up: it is God who “sitteth upon the circle of the earth, and the inhabitants thereof are as grasshoppers” (Isaiah 40:22), meaning everyone living on the earth is small in His sight, whatever they look like to us.

Were the giants of Numbers 13:33 the Nephilim of Genesis 6:4?

The word is the same, and Scripture does not join them up for us. Numbers 13:33 uses nephilim, the word Genesis 6:4 uses of the giants before the flood, and many read the ten’s choice of that word as a deliberate attempt to frighten the nation.

What Scripture does record plainly is that the Anakim were real, tall and feared: Israel had a proverb about them (Deuteronomy 9:2), Joshua later cut them off from the hill country with a remnant surviving in Gaza, Gath and Ashdod (Joshua 11:21-22), and Goliath of Gath was one man of great stature who came out of that region (1 Samuel 17:4). Their descent is a question the Bible leaves open, and building a doctrine on it goes past the evidence.

Common Misunderstandings

• That sending the spies was itself the sin. God granted the mission and Moses carried it out at His word (verse 3). Numbers 14 puts the sin in what the ten said about the land and in how Israel answered it, not in the search.
• That the ten lied about the facts. Almost everything they reported was accurate. What they added was a verdict nobody had asked them for, “we be not able” (verse 31), and one exaggeration, since “all the people” were not giants and they had met the sons of Anak in one place. Moses’ own record of the moment preserves what they said first: “It is a good land which the LORD our God doth give us” (Deuteronomy 1:25).
• That the cluster needed two men because of its weight. They carried it “between two upon a staff” (verse 23), and Moses gives no reason for the arrangement. Travellers and commentators have long reported clusters of ten to twenty pounds from that region, and most take the staff as a way of bringing the fruit home unbruised rather than as a measure of its size.

Christ Connection

The clearest line from this chapter to Christ runs through a name. Moses renamed Oshea, which means salvation, to Jehoshua, which means the LORD is salvation (verse 16). In Greek that name is Iesous, and the King James prints it as Jesus twice where Joshua is meant: “our fathers that came after brought in with Jesus into the possession of the Gentiles” (Acts 7:45), and “For if Jesus had given them rest, then would he not afterward have spoken of another day” (Hebrews 4:8).

The angel told Joseph the same meaning from the other side of the promise: “thou shalt call his name JESUS: for he shall save his people from their sins” (Matthew 1:21). Joshua carries that name through the whole chapter in which Israel refuses the land he would one day lead them into.

The New Testament goes on to use this exact failure as a warning to the church, which is the second connection and the heavier one. Hebrews says of that generation, “So we see that they could not enter in because of unbelief” (Hebrews 3:19), meaning the thing that shut them out of the land was their refusal to believe God. It then presses the point onto its own readers: the same good news came to Israel and did them no good, because they heard it without faith (Hebrews 4:2).

Paul reads the wilderness the same way, saying these things “happened unto them for ensamples” (1 Corinthians 10:11). Numbers 13 is the day the promise was believed about the land and disbelieved about the God who gave it, and Hebrews 4:9 answers it with the offer still standing: “There remaineth therefore a rest to the people of God.”

When, Where, and Why

• When: roughly two years after Israel left Egypt. They had departed Sinai on the twentieth day of the second month of the second year (Numbers 10:11), and the narrator dates the mission by the harvest, “the time of the firstripe grapes” (verse 20), which points to late July or August.
• Where: Kadesh, in the wilderness of Paran (verse 26), at the southern approach to Canaan. Its exact site is disputed and no identification is settled. Their route ran border to border, ending at Rehob near the entering of Hamath in the far north.
• Why: Moses is writing the record of how one generation lost the land God had sworn to them. Numbers 13 supplies the evidence for the verdict in Numbers 14, which is why the chapter takes such care to name the twelve men, to record that the land was exactly as good as God had said, and to preserve the one sentence that answered them.

Key Verses

Read the whole chapter for yourself at Numbers 13 (KJV).

“Send thou men, that they may search the land of Canaan, which I give unto the children of Israel: of every tribe of their fathers shall ye send a man, every one a ruler among them.” (Numbers 13:2)

God calls Canaan a land He is giving to Israel, in the present tense, before a single man has looked at it. Everything the spies see afterwards sits inside a promise that was already settled.

“And they told him, and said, We came unto the land whither thou sentest us, and surely it floweth with milk and honey; and this is the fruit of it. Nevertheless the people be strong that dwell in the land, and the cities are walled, and very great: and moreover we saw the children of Anak there.” (Numbers 13:27-28)

The first sentence proves God told the truth, and the fruit in their hands proves it twice over. Then “nevertheless” arrives, meaning “all that granted, it changes nothing,” and the rest of Israel’s history turns on it.

“And Caleb stilled the people before Moses, and said, Let us go up at once, and possess it; for we are well able to overcome it.” (Numbers 13:30)

Caleb had to silence a crowd, which is what “stilled” means here, so something had already broken out before he spoke. He also does not say conquer it, he says possess it, as a man takes what has been handed to him. Forty-five years later he described this day himself: “I brought him word again as it was in mine heart” (Joshua 14:7). He was forty years old when he said it, and eighty-five when he asked Joshua for the same mountain the giants had been standing on.

“But the men that went up with him said, We be not able to go up against the people; for they are stronger than we.” (Numbers 13:31)

These men had walked through the sea on dry ground and had seen Amalek beaten (Exodus 14:29; Exodus 17:13). Their sentence weighs Israel against Canaan and stops there.

Key Lessons from Numbers 13

• A promise God has already given is not open to a vote.
• Evidence by itself did not produce faith here, since the ten were holding the fruit of the land while they said it could not be taken (verses 27 and 31).
• Reporting the facts and pronouncing the verdict are two different jobs, and the ten were only sent for the first (verses 18 to 20 and 31).
• One voice that reckons with God is the right one even when it is outnumbered ten to one (verse 30).
• What we say about God’s promises can travel much further than we intend, as one speech from ten men set the course of a whole nation (verses 31 to 33; Numbers 14:1-4).

To follow the whole book chapter by chapter, read our full study: The Book of Numbers Summary by Chapter.

Bible Study Questions

1. Compare the six things Moses asked the spies to find out (verses 18 to 20) with what the ten actually reported (verses 28 to 33). What did they add that he never asked for?
2. Why does it matter that the ten spies opened with a true sentence about the land in verse 27?
3. Caleb says “possess it” rather than conquer it in verse 30. What does that word assume about God?
4. Read verses 27 to 33 again and look for God. Where does He appear in the report of the ten?
5. Why do you think Scripture preserves the names of all twelve men in verses 4 to 16, and not only the two who were faithful?
6. Read Hebrews 3:16-19 alongside this chapter. What does the writer say the real failure at Kadesh was?
7. Is there something God has already settled in His word that you keep sending out scouts to check on?

Frequently Asked Questions

Numbers 13, The Full Text (KJV)

Read the full chapter below for reference.

1 And the LORD spake unto Moses, saying,

2 Send thou men, that they may search the land of Canaan, which I give unto the children of Israel: of every tribe of their fathers shall ye send a man, every one a ruler among them.

3 And Moses by the commandment of the LORD sent them from the wilderness of Paran: all those men were heads of the children of Israel.

4 And these were their names: of the tribe of Reuben, Shammua the son of Zaccur.

5 Of the tribe of Simeon, Shaphat the son of Hori.

6 Of the tribe of Judah, Caleb the son of Jephunneh.

7 Of the tribe of Issachar, Igal the son of Joseph.

8 Of the tribe of Ephraim, Oshea the son of Nun.

9 Of the tribe of Benjamin, Palti the son of Raphu.

10 Of the tribe of Zebulun, Gaddiel the son of Sodi.

11 Of the tribe of Joseph, namely, of the tribe of Manasseh, Gaddi the son of Susi.

12 Of the tribe of Dan, Ammiel the son of Gemalli.

13 Of the tribe of Asher, Sethur the son of Michael.

14 Of the tribe of Naphtali, Nahbi the son of Vophsi.

15 Of the tribe of Gad, Geuel the son of Machi.

16 These are the names of the men which Moses sent to spy out the land. And Moses called Oshea the son of Nun Jehoshua.

17 And Moses sent them to spy out the land of Canaan, and said unto them, Get you up this way southward, and go up into the mountain:

18 And see the land, what it is; and the people that dwelleth therein, whether they be strong or weak, few or many;

19 And what the land is that they dwell in, whether it be good or bad; and what cities they be that they dwell in, whether in tents, or in strong holds;

20 And what the land is, whether it be fat or lean, whether there be wood therein, or not. And be ye of good courage, and bring of the fruit of the land. Now the time was the time of the firstripe grapes.

21 So they went up, and searched the land from the wilderness of Zin unto Rehob, as men come to Hamath.

22 And they ascended by the south, and came unto Hebron; where Ahiman, Sheshai, and Talmai, the children of Anak, were. (Now Hebron was built seven years before Zoan in Egypt.)

23 And they came unto the brook of Eshcol, and cut down from thence a branch with one cluster of grapes, and they bare it between two upon a staff; and they brought of the pomegranates, and of the figs.

24 The place was called the brook Eshcol, because of the cluster of grapes which the children of Israel cut down from thence.

25 And they returned from searching of the land after forty days.

26 And they went and came to Moses, and to Aaron, and to all the congregation of the children of Israel, unto the wilderness of Paran, to Kadesh; and brought back word unto them, and unto all the congregation, and shewed them the fruit of the land.

27 And they told him, and said, We came unto the land whither thou sentest us, and surely it floweth with milk and honey; and this is the fruit of it.

28 Nevertheless the people be strong that dwell in the land, and the cities are walled, and very great: and moreover we saw the children of Anak there.

29 The Amalekites dwell in the land of the south: and the Hittites, and the Jebusites, and the Amorites, dwell in the mountains: and the Canaanites dwell by the sea, and by the coast of Jordan.

30 And Caleb stilled the people before Moses, and said, Let us go up at once, and possess it; for we are well able to overcome it.

31 But the men that went up with him said, We be not able to go up against the people; for they are stronger than we.

32 And they brought up an evil report of the land which they had searched unto the children of Israel, saying, The land, through which we have gone to search it, is a land that eateth up the inhabitants thereof; and all the people that we saw in it are men of a great stature.

33 And there we saw the giants, the sons of Anak, which come of the giants: and we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight.