For the Lord your God has blessed you in all the work of your hands. He has watched over your journey through this immense wilderness. The Lord your God has been with you these past forty years, and you have lacked nothing.”
God turned away and gave them up to worship the stars of heaven, as it is written in the book of the prophets: House of Israel, did you bring me offerings and sacrifices for forty years in the wilderness?
Israelites, are you not like the Cushites to me? This is the Lord’s declaration. Didn’t I bring Israel from the land of Egypt, the Philistines from Caphtor, , and the Arameans from Kir?
and I have come down to rescue them from the power of the Egyptians and to bring them from that land to a good and spacious land, a land flowing with milk and honey #– #the territory of the Canaanites, Hethites, Amorites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites.
Your children, who you said would be plunder, your sons who don’t yet know good from evil, will enter there. I will give them the land, and they will take possession of it.
So they gave a negative report to the Israelites about the land they had scouted: ‘The land we passed through to explore is one that devours its inhabitants, and all the people we saw in it are men of great size.
The Lord’s anger burned against Israel, and he made them wander in the wilderness forty years until the whole generation that had done what was evil in the Lord’s sight was gone.
‘ “Later, I brought you to the land of the Amorites who lived beyond the Jordan. They fought against you, but I handed them over to you. You possessed their land, and I annihilated them before you.
They stopped asking, ‘Where is the Lord who brought us from the land of Egypt, who led us through the wilderness, through a land of deserts and ravines, through a land of drought and darkness, a land no one travelled through and where no one lived? ’