פירוש על במדבר 14:29

וכל פקדיכם לכל מספרכם AND ALL OF YOU THAT WERE NUMBERED IN ANY COUNTING OF YOU — i.e. all that are numbered of you in any census (מספר) in which you are numbered, as, for instance, on going to or coming back from war, or when giving the shekels: all who are numbered in all these censuses shall die, and these are, everyone מבן עשרים שנה וגו׳ FROM TWENTY YEARS OLD AND UPWARDS — The age is expressly mentioned to exclude the tribe of Levi because those who were numbered of them were not from twenty years old and upwards (but they were either numbered from one month old — cf. Numbers 3:40, or from thirty years old; Numbers 4:3) (Bava Batra 121b).

מבן עשרים שנה..אשר הלינותם, "from the age of twenty and up..because you have complained against Me." We must try and understand why G'd said אשר הלינתם. If the word אשר is to be equivalent to על אשר (the way we have translated it), then there is nothing new here. G'd had mentioned this already in verse 27!

במדבר הזה יפלו פגריכם, “your carcasses will drop in this desert.” It appears that the Israelites’ guilt in this episode could be divided into three levels. Some of them had wept, some of them had complained against Moses and Aaron saying: “if only we had died already.” The third level consisted of the people who had said: “let us appoint a leader and head back for Egypt” (verse 4). The reason the Torah mentions the word “your carcasses” three times is to allude to these different levels of the people. The choice of the word “your carcasses,” which at first glance seems very harsh, is actually the reverse. It means that only the bodies of these people would die, they would not lose their entitlement to life in the hereafter. (Compare Rabbi Eliezer in Sanhedrin 105 and 110). This allusion is repeated in verse 35: “in this desert they will expire and there they will die.” The words: “all of you who have been numbered for military service,” mean that the Levites were excluded from this decree as they had not been part of the army and when they had been numbered the babies of one month old were already included in that count (Baba Batra 121).