Therefore, I have come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land to a good and spacious land, to a land flowing with milk and honey, to the place of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites.
They did not say, “Where is the Lord who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, who led us through the wilderness, through a land of deserts and of pits, through a land of drought and of the shadow of death, through a land that no man passed through and where no man lived?”
Are you not like the Cushites to Me, O Israelites? says the Lord. Did I not bring Israel up from the land of Egypt, but also the Philistines from Caphtor, and the Arameans from Kir?
They gave the Israelites a bad report of the land which they had spied out, saying, “The land through which we have gone as spies is a land that devours its inhabitants, and all the people whom we saw in it are men of great stature.
The anger of the Lord was inflamed against Israel, and He made them wander in the wilderness forty years, until all the generation that did evil in the eyes of the Lord was finished.
But God turned and gave them up to worship the host of heaven, as it is written in the book of the Prophets: ‘O House of Israel, have you offered to Me slain animals and sacrifices for forty years in the wilderness?
Moreover, your little ones, who you said would be a prey, and your children, who in that day had no knowledge between good and evil, they shall go in, and to them will I give it, and they shall possess it.
“For the Lord your God has blessed you in all the works of your hands. He knows your wanderings through this great wilderness. These forty years the Lord your God has been with you. You have lacked nothing.”
“I brought you to the land of the Amorites who lived on the other side of the Jordan. They waged war against you, but I gave them into your hand so that you might inherit their land, and I destroyed them before you.