Nu. 13: Aughhh!! Giants! Grapes!

Numbers 13 is that story I used to hear as a kid about how these men explored the promised land and then everyone but two came back and said they were afraid of the giants and the fortified cities. I also remember seeing an illustration in a kids Bible Stories book where they were the size of grasshoppers compared to them. Awesome. Creepy. Anyway.

God tells Moses to have someone from each tribe go into the land "which I am giving" to the Israelites. Not the land that He "will give." Suggests that this land gift was a process that was currently underway. It wasn't quite theirs yet, but it was essentially a done deal. Anyway, someone from each tribe (except the Levites, a'course) is picked to go into the land and explore it. One of them was Joshua, the son of Nun, who was helping Moses out with whatever, and had already been a military leader.

They had very clear instructions. To see if the people were strong or week, few or many. If the land was good or bad. If the towns were fortified. If the soil was fertile or poor. Trees or not. Bring back some of the fruit of the land while you're at it. You know. All the stuff you want to know before you move to a new place.

They checked out the Desert of Zin, Rehob, Lebo Hamath, Hebron, to Kadesh, and back. They saw the land where the descendents of Anak lived...giants. These are revealed to be the Nephilim, who were first mentioned around the fall of man in Genesis 6 I believe. More on the Nephilim here. Probably in giant cities. I wonder how giant, though. Because as a kid, you hear about giants, and you think about like Jack and the Beanstalk, or King Kong, where if you get picked up by one of them, you're like the size of his finger, and he holds you like a banana. But the reality is, maybe they were only like the size of Yao Ming or something. Which is freakishly tall, but not monstrously tall. I don't know.

The people weren't the only thing that was bigger out there. It took two people to carry a cluster of grapes back to the Israelites. Maybe the grapes were like the size of apples.

When the explorers got back, they told Moses that the land flowed with milk and honey, but that the people were huge as well as their cities. The people probably freaked out and were yelling, so Caleb gets up and tells them to be quiet, and that they can go take possession of the land, and should do so immediately. I love Caleb, he was like, balls out. "Lets go take the land!" But he gets lassoed back to "reality" by the other guys he was with. "They are stronger than we are." Which was probably true. But God was capable of providing awesome military victory to his people, like when Abram got all rowdy and when Joshua fought the Amalekites. This wasn't too long ago, since Joshua was one of the men who went in to explore Canaan.

So these explorers who were scared went in among the people, and denounced this land as well as the plan. I'm sure God was real happy with this attitude, because the fear and the distrust was not brought to him, rather to the people. We'll see what happens. After all, this promised land was promised to them, so was God also promising them defeat at the hands of the Hittites, Jebusites and the Amalekites?