Biblion Bible Commentary
Read the introduction to Deuteronomy · About this commentary
You Would Not Go Up
Deuteronomy 1:19-33
19 We traveled from Horeb and went through all that great and terrible wilderness which you saw, by the way to the hill country of the Amorites, as Yahweh our God commanded us; and we came to Kadesh Barnea. · WEB
The refusal at the border is retold as unbelief rather than cowardice, and its worst moment is a sentence about God's motive.
The retelling is in the second person throughout, and the audience mostly was not there. Their parents did this. Moses tells it as though they did, which is the method the whole book runs on.
The sending of the spies is reported here as the people's idea: you came near to me, everyone of you, and said, 'Let's send men before us' Deuteronomy 1:22. And Moses agreed — the thing pleased me well Deuteronomy 1:23. He does not exempt himself.
The report that came back was good. They brought fruit and said it is a good land which Yahweh our God gives to us Deuteronomy 1:25. In this account the reconnaissance succeeded and the intelligence was favorable.
Then: yet you wouldn't go up, but rebelled Deuteronomy 1:26.
What they said in their tents is the low point of the chapter, and it is a statement about God's character. Because Yahweh hated us, he has brought us out of the land of Egypt, to deliver us into the hand of the Amorites to destroy us Deuteronomy 1:27.
That is an extraordinary reading of the exodus. Every act of rescue is reinterpreted as a long deception — the plagues, the sea, the manna, all of it a route to a killing ground. Fear has not merely made them cautious; it has rewritten the whole history they lived through, and it has assigned a motive.
Moses' answer appeals to that history and to nothing else. God will fight for you, according to all that he did for you in Egypt before your eyes Deuteronomy 1:30.
And then the image that is the warmest thing in the first address: in the wilderness where you have seen how that Yahweh your God carried you, as a man carries his son, in all the way that you went Deuteronomy 1:31.
Against the charge of hatred he sets a father carrying a child who cannot walk the distance. They had been carried the entire way, and they were saying they had been led out to be destroyed.
The verdict on the episode is one clause, and it does not name fear: yet in this thing you didn't believe Yahweh your God Deuteronomy 1:32. Not that they were afraid of the Anakim, which would have been reasonable. That they had evidence and did not trust it.
And the next verse lists what the evidence was — the one who went before you on the way, to seek out a place for you to pitch your tents in: in fire by night... and in the cloud by day Deuteronomy 1:33. He had been scouting camps for them the whole journey, which is what the spies had just been sent to do.
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