Scouts Sent to Canaan

(Book of Numbers 13:1 - 13:33) 
Jehovah instructed Moses, "Send out scouts to reconnoiter the land of Canaan, which I am giving to the people of Israel.  Let them all be leaders, one from each of the ancestral tribes."

Moses did as Jehovah commanded.  He dispatched twelve men, all Israelite tribal leaders, from their camp in the desert of Paran.  These were their names and respective tribes:

Shammua son of Zaccur -- Reuben
Shaphat son of Hori -- Simeon
Caleb son of Jephunneh -- Judah
Igal son of Joseph -- Issachar
Hoshea son of Nun -- Ephraim
Palti son of Raphu -- Benjamin
Gaddiel son of Sodi -- Zebulun
Gaddi son of Susi -- Manasseh (Joseph)
Ammiel son of Gemalli -- Dan
Sethur son of Michael -- Asher
Nahbi son of Vophsi -- Naphtali
Geuel son of Machi -- Gad

These are the names of the men Moses sent to scout out the land.  (Moses changed the name of Hoshea son of Nun to Joshua.) 

When Moses sent them out to explore Canaan, he charged them, "Journey there via the Negev into the hill country.  Survey the land and determine whether the inhabitants are strong or weak, few or many, whether the land on which they live is good or bad, whether there are walled towns or unfortified camps, whether the soil is fertile or poor, and whether or not there are many trees.  Make an effort to bring back samples of the crops and fruits you may see there."  (It was the season for picking the first ripe grapes).

The scouts set out and explored the land from the desert of Zin as far as Rehob, toward Lebo Hamath.  They traversed the Negev and arrived at Hebron, where the sons of Anak, Ahiman, Sheshai, and Talmai, lived.  (The city of Hebron was built 7 years before the Egyptian city of Zoan.)  When they reached the valley of Eshcol, they cut down a branch with a single cluster of grapes that was so large it took two men to carry it on a pole.  They also brought back pomegranates and figs.  (This place was named the Eshcol Wadi, because of the cluster of grapes the Israelites cut down there.)

At the end of 40 days they returned from their scouting expedition.  They reported to Moses and Aaron and to whole community of Israel camped at Kadesh in the desert of Paran and showed them the fruit from the land.  This was the report they gave to Moses: "We entered the land you sent us reconnoiter.  It is indeed a land flowing with milk and honey.  Here are samples of its fruit.  The inhabitants are strong and live in large, fortified towns.  We even saw the descendants of Anak there.  The Amalekites dwell in the Negev.  The Hethites, Jebusites, and Amorites inhabit the hill country, while the Canaanites occupy the sea coast and the Jordan River Valley.”

Caleb, to quiet the people who were challenging Moses, enjoined them, "We should go up there right now and occupy the country, for we are well able to conquer it."

But the men who had accompanied him dissented. “We can't attack these people; they’re stronger than we are."  They spread among the Israelites a false, unfavorable report about the country they had explored.  They claimed, "The land we surveyed as scouts eats up its inhabitants.  All the people we saw there were of gigantic stature.  We even encountered extraterrestrial beings (for the Anakim are descended from extraterrestrials.)  Beside them we felt as if we were mere locusts, and they must have felt the same about us.”

Notes
1. At Jehovah's behest, Moses sends out men to explore Canaan and scout out the land they intend to settle, but it is odd that they are tribal leaders.  Selecting a man from each of the tribes of Israel makes sense politically, but chiefs would be older men.  Wouldn't it be better to choose younger, fitter men more able to endure the rigors of the expedition and who, if lost, would be expendable?  Of course, the tribal chiefs would possess better judgment and whatever they reported would have credibility. 

2.  There is no explanation given why Moses changed Hoshea son of Nun's name to Joshua. In Genesis Jehovah dubs Abram, Abraham, and an involved story is spun to justify Jacob's name change to Israel.   Hoshea means "salvation," while Joshua means "he is salvation" and is a shortened form of Jehoshua, "Jehovah is salvation."  There is perhaps some great significance in the name change, but it is hardly explicit.  There is also the possibility that Hoshea and Joshua were actually two different people.  Also, take note that Joshua was the Hebrew name of Jesus, the Messiah.

3.  The incident of the large cluster of grapes is hard to explain except as an exaggeration, a Bunyanesque tall tale to emphasize the bounteous nature of the land proverbially flowing with milk and honey.

4. Anak was the son of Arba and the father of Ahiman, Sheshai, and Talmai of Hebron.  The Anakim, a race of giants, were supposedly descended from the Nephilim who were mentioned as a hybrid race of antediluvian times.  Nephilim is often translated as "fallen angels," however "fallen" should not be interpreted metaphorical, "fallen" in moral sense, but rather "fallen to earth," having come down to earth, not, I do believe, from Heaven, but from the heavens -- thus, human-like beings from space, extraterrestrials, (although there is another possibility, that the Nephilim descended not in space craft, but from airships emanating from another part of the earth).  The Bible suggests -- and it is suggested in many other ancient records as well -- that the Nephilim, or other beings like them (the "gods"), mated with earth women and created a hybrid species of humans, who, not surprisingly, were in many respects superior -- eg., the heroes of Greek myth, the early Egyptian pharaohs.  Anak's family apparently claimed extraterrestrial descent and were certainly not alone among the ancients in claiming to have a "god" on the family tree.  The original antediluvian Nephilim would have been wiped out in the Flood, so members of the race mentioned here would have had to have been produced by subsequent contact by these beings with womankind.   Genesis does, in fact, state that these beings would later appear on earth.

5.  Anak and his sons are mentioned in Middle Kingdom Egyptian inscriptions of the Pharaoh's Canaanite enemies.  However, this was probably hundreds of years before Moses and the Exodus.  No one dates the Exodus as early as the Middle Kingdom, which ended around 1650 BC.  (The Bible points to 1446 BC for the Exodus, although any date is problematic.)  Weaving Anak into the Exodus narrative seems, then, to be quite a stretch.

6.  Those who dissent from the viewpoint of Caleb, a let's-get'r-done kind of guy who urges the Israelites to invade and take over Canaan right now, color, if not contradict the scouting report they have given to Moses when they disseminate it among the people.  They want to dissuade the Israelites from mounting an invasion of Canaan and are not above lying to them to lobby for their point of view.  (The story of giants is meant to taken as an exaggeration, for the giants, the extraterrestrial hybrids, were seen in Hebron, only not throughout the entire land)  Would the scouts have lied if they had been a group of ordinary soldiers rather than tribal leaders with their own political agenda?  Not to second guess at this late date, but perhaps Jehovah made a mistake by having Moses send out tribal leaders as scouts.

7. The scouts are gone for 40 days, probably corresponding to the 40 years the Israelites will have to wander before being allowed to settle in the Promised Land.  It seems to be a magic number, but, like all the numbers in the Bible, dates, ages, etc., it is suspicious symmetrical and highly suspect.

8.  The Negev was, as it is, the wedge-shaped southern part of what is now Israel.  The Desert of Zin was to the north of Negev.  The Egyptian city of Zoan has not been positively identified.  Its mention in later biblical books probably refers to the 11th-Century BC Delta city of Tanis.  But here, Zoan is likely to be the Hyksos capital of Avaris in Goshen, founded in the early 18th-Century BC.  The city of Hebron, now a large Palestinian, West Bank city, 19 miles south of Jerusalem, was a Canaanite royal city in the 18th-Century BC.  It is near the burial cave of Abraham.  The city of Kadesh, or Kadesh-Barnea, lies in the southern part of Zin.  It marks the traditional southern border of ancient Israel.   However, the Kadesh mentioned here clearly cannot be the same place, for the Israelites were then encamped in the Desert of Paran, not Zin.   Neither are to be confused with the Syrian-Hittite city of Kadesh on the Orontes River, where a famous battle occurred between the Hittites and the Egyptians under Ramesses the Great in the year 1274 BC (by conventional Egyptian chronology -- which is probably wrong).