“Your carcases shall fall in this wilderness; and all that were numbered of you, ... from twenty years old and upward, which have murmured against me.
“Doubtless ye shall not come into the land....
“But as for you, your carcases, they shall fall in this wilderness....
“And the men which Moses sent to search the land, who returned, and made all the congregation to murmur against him, by bringing up a slander upon the land,—
“Even those men that did bring up the evil report upon the land, died by the plague before the Lord.
“But Joshua ... and Caleb, ... which were of the men that went to search the land, lived still.
“And Moses told these sayings unto all the children of Israel and the people mourned greatly.”
The congregation were now completely out of hand. They knew not what Moses wanted to do, nor did they comprehend what Moses was attempting to make the Lord threaten: except that he had in mind some dire mischief. Accordingly, the people decided that the best thing for them was to go forward as Joshua and Caleb proposed. So, early in the morning, they went up into the top of the mountain, saying, “We be here, and will go up unto the place which the Lord hath promised: for we have sinned.”
But Moses was more dissatisfied than ever. “Wherefore now do you transgress the commandment of the Lord? But it shall not prosper.” Notwithstanding, “they presumed to go up unto the hilltop: nevertheless the ark of the covenant of the Lord, and Moses, departed not out of the camp.
“Then the Amalekites came down, and the Canaanites, which dwelt in that hill, and smote them, and discomfited them, even unto Hormah”; which was at a very considerable distance,—perhaps not less than thirty miles, though the positions are not very well established.