Numbers 13:31-33

13:31 But the men ¹  who had gone up with him said, “We are not able to go up against these people, because they are stronger than we are!” 13:32 Then they presented the Israelites with a discouraging ²  report of the land they had investigated, saying, “The land that we passed through ³  to investigate is a land that devours ⁴  its inhabitants. ⁵  All the people we saw there ⁶  are of great stature. 13:33 We even saw the Nephilim ⁷  there (the descendants of Anak came from the Nephilim), and we seemed liked grasshoppers both to ourselves ⁸  and to them.” ⁹ 

¹ tn The vav (ו) disjunctive on the noun at the beginning of the clause forms a strong adversative clause here.

² tn Or “an evil report,” i.e., one that was a defamation of the grace of God.

³ tn Heb “which we passed over in it”; the pronoun on the preposition serves as a resumptive pronoun for the relative, and need not be translated literally.

⁴ tn The verb is the feminine singular participle from אָכַל (’akhal); it modifies the land as a “devouring land,” a bold figure for the difficulty of living in the place.

⁵ sn The expression has been interpreted in a number of ways by commentators, such as that the land was infertile, that the Canaanites were cannibals, that it was a land filled with warlike dissensions, or that it denotes a land geared for battle. It may be that they intended the land to seem infertile and insecure.

⁶ tn Heb “in its midst.”

⁷ tc The Greek version uses gigantes (“giants”) to translate “the Nephilim,” but it does not retain the clause “the sons of Anak are from the Nephilim.”

⁸ tn Heb “in our eyes.”

⁹ tn Heb “in their eyes.”