1: 21-22 - See, the Lord your God has given you the land. Go up and take possession of it as the Lord, the God of your fathers, told you. Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged." Then all of you came to me and said, "Let us send men ahead to spy out the land for us and bring back a report about the route we are to take and the towns we will come to." ♥

Moses' command to them to "see . . . go up and take possession of it" recalls Yahweh's earlier command (v8). It aslo shifts the attention to the decisive gift of the land by Yahweh. There, in v8, however, it was a call to faith; here, at Kadesh Barnea, it is a call to action, and takes on an urgency that it would have lacked when the command was first given at Horeb.

This urgency is clearly reflected in the style of the Heb. sentences here. Up to this point in his speech, Moses has consistently addressed his audience with the second-person plural pronoun.1 Here he switches over to the second-person singular pronoun. This alteration between the plural and singular forms found here and in a number of other places in Deuteronomy, has posed something of a puzzle for scholars of the book. The proposal we have found most satisfactory is that the form of address "is chosen for rhetorical reasons: the singular emphasizes Israel as a unit, the sovereign entity ultimately responsible for the administration of Torah; the plural is the arresting variation, focusing (paradoxically perhaps) on the responsibility of each individual to keep the covenant."2 Switching to the singular pronoun, Moses calls Israel to work in unity to take the land. Subsequent events would show how prescient was Moses's wisdom in this summons to concord.

Implicit in the call to "go in and take possession" is making war on the inhabitants. In the face of the coming battles, therefore, Moses urges them not to fear (v21). The phrase-pair "Do not be afraid. Do not be discouraged," appears to be formulaic phases, occurring frequently in passages where war is the context.3 Such exhortation to courage is natural in the face of the enemy; the fact that these phrases may be formulaic detracts nothing from their emotional-psychological power. This recounting would have been particularly poignant for GenB, as they stood on the plains of Moab, the Promised Land already within sight,4 and when, in not very many days' time, it would be their turn to do what their parents had been commanded but failed to do. Here the gift of the land is no longer a matter of anticipative imagination, nor the command to "go up and take possession of it" the mere rhetoric of promise as it was for their parents at Horeb.

The comment in v22 that "then all of you came to me and said, 'Let us send men ahead to spy out the land,'" is interesting. It suggests that the proposal to send in the scouts came from the people. The presentation preserved in Num 13 gives the impression that the initiative for the endeavour had come from Yahweh. The two accounts are not incompatible. The proposal may initially have come from the people, as recalled here, while Num 13 simply records God's response to the proposal. Whatever may be the origin of the proposal, it was a good proposal. But, as we will soon see, good beginnings do not always result in good endings if the heart is not right.

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