Komentarz do Liczb 13:32

אכלת יושביה [A LAND] THAT EATETH UP THE INHABITANTS THEREOF — “In every place which we passed we found them (the inhabitants) burying their dead". — But, as a matter of fact, the Holy One, blessed be He, did this (caused many deaths amongst them at that time, and so the Canaanites were engaged in burying their dead) for the best, in order to occupy them busily with their mourning so that they should pay no attention to these (the spies) (Sotah 35a).

AND THEY BROUGHT FORTH ‘DIBATH’ (AN EVIL REPORT OF) THE LAND WHICH THEY HAD SPIED OUT UNTO THE CHILDREN OF ISRAEL. The meaning of this is that the spies left Moses and Aaron and [went around] saying in the [people’s] tents that it is a Land that eateth up the inhabitants thereof.⁶⁰Verse 32. For at first when they spoke to the people in front of Moses and Aaron [saying] that the Land … floweth with milk and honey but that the people are fierce,⁵³Verses 27-28. and Caleb said, for we are well able to overcome it,⁶¹Verse 30. the people hesitated [between these two opinions], and there were some of them who [still] trusted in their power and strength, and some of them [who trusted] in the help of the Eternal against the mighty.⁶⁵Judges 5:23. Then the spies spread the evil report in front of the people themselves, as it is written, the Land through which we have passed to spy it out, is a Land that eateth up the inhabitants thereof, etc.,⁶⁰Verse 32. until they caused the whole congregation⁶⁶Further, 14:2. to complain, this being the sense of the verse stating, and they returned, and made all the congregation to murmur against him, by bringing up an evil report against the Land.⁶⁷Ibid., Verse 36. This happened because when the spies saw the [Amorite] people whose height was like the height of the cedars, and he was strong as the oaks,⁶⁸Amos 2:9. the fear of them was fallen upon them⁶⁹Esther 8:17. and they made the hearts of their brothers melt.¹³Deuteronomy 1:28. And when they saw that the Israelites were still considering going up [to the Land], and that Joshua and Caleb were encouraging them to do so, they invented a false report in order to frustrate their [intention of] going up by all possible means.
Know that he who “bringeth forth ‘dibah’” is a fool⁷⁰Proverbs 10:8. who speaks falsely, but he who tells a truthful [bad report] is called “one who ‘brings’ dibah,” as it is said, and Joseph brought ‘dibatham ra’ah’ (evil report of them) unto their father.⁷¹Genesis 37:2. This shows that when Scripture uses the expression “he ‘brings’ dibah” it means that he tells the truth as he sees, and when it uses the expression “bringeth forth” [which is in Hebrew a different verb], it means a false report. See also Ramban ibid., Vol. I, p. 449. It was for this [false report] that they were punished by death through a plague, as it is said, And those men that ‘brought forth’ an evil report of the Land, died by the plague before the Eternal.⁷²Further, 14:37. Thus, in speaking of the spies having brought forth an evil report, Scripture by using the word ra’ah (evil) wishes to emphasize that not only was their report false but that it was also of an exceedingly evil nature.

ארץ אוכלת יושביה, even though the people living there are strong, this is not a compliment to the land; rather it means that it is only due to their exceptionally hardy constitution that they were able to survive in that land. Ordinary people would die there because the climate is so hard to take.

וכל העם אשר ראינו בתוכה, "and all the people we have seen within it, etc." This may either mean that the country devours its people in spite of their outstanding physical prowess, or it may mean that the only people who are able to survive in that country, i.e. בתוכה, are the אנשי מדות, the men of especially great stature.

ויוציאו דבת הארץ....אל בני ישראל, “They slandered the land of Israel ..in their report to the Jewish people.” The principal effrontery of the spies was the fact that they reported to and appealed to the people directly, instead of making their report to the commander-in-chief, Moses, who was the one who had selected them for their mission by going around to the tents of the people and telling them that the land of Canaan was devouring its inhabitants, whereas originally in the presence of Moses and Aaron they had praised the land, describing how it was flowing with milk and honey. This was a treacherous and underhanded manner of discharging their task. Originally, they had only described the people in that land as strong, which by itself was not too serious a departure from what they had been asked to report about. When Calev had assured the people of his conviction that they would be able to successfully conquer that land the people had still tended to believe him. There were at that time, still quite a number of the people who possessed either self confidence or trust in G’d’s ability and willingness to help them conquer that land. When the spies had become aware of this, they embarked on an intensive campaign to undermine the confidence of those people by spreading the stories of the many people they had observed dropping dead. This was another example of misinterpretation. G’d had allowed even giants to collapse, in order to demonstrate how tenuous was even those supermen’s hold on life, whereas the spies, bent of interpreting everything in the most negative manner, concluded that the climate of the land causes the collapse of its inhabitants. In order to counter the impression Joshua and Calev had made on the people, the spies now resorted to fabrications, deliberate exaggerations, etc. The expression להוציא דבה means more than to highlight the negative aspects of something, it means to spread tales of a negative character that are entirely fictitious, represent as facts figments of the imagination of the tale-bearer. The party spreading such untruths hopes to make them believable because he had initially told his listeners a considerable number of true facts. This is also why the Torah reports Joseph as bringing דבתם רעה, “evil reports,” about his brothers to his father. He had reported a number of facts faithfully, so that his fabrications would also be believed by his father, Genesis 37,2, It was this latter aspect of the spies’ activities that caused G’d to punish them by making these ten men die on the spot through the plague. (14,37)

Burying the dead. Rashi’s inference is because it is written “the land through which we have passed … is a land which consumes,” but the words “the land through which we passed” are apparently superfluous; for this is not the beginning of their statement, such that they need to state which land they were referring to. Therefore Rashi explains that wherever we passed we saw that it was consuming its inhabitants — because they were burying the dead. R. Yaakov Triosh

V. 32. דבת) ויציאו וגו׳ siehe zu Bereschit 37, 2). In dieser Verlästerung des Landes gipfelt ihr Verbrechen. Nicht ויביאו, wie bei Josef, sondern ויציאו sie produzierten, erdichteten Böses vom Lande (רמב׳׳ן). Damit schreckten sie das Volk vollends zurück. Selbst wenn es gelänge, das Land zu erobern, so wäre dessen Besitz geradezu ein Unglück. Es ist ein Land, das seine Bewohner aufreibt. Es ist nicht für Menschen gewöhnlichen Schlages berechnet. Es fordert Riesenkonstitutionen. Gewöhnliche Menschen sterben darin hin. Daher ist auch die Bevölkerung von so ungewöhnlicher Größe. Die Kleinen und Schwachen kommen nicht auf (רמב׳׳ן).

וכל העם אשר ראינו בתוכה אנשי מדות, “and all the people we saw inside it are men of great size.” The spies said that they did not attribute the fact that people seemed to die like flies in that land to their having a weak constitution to start with. Alternate interpretation: “do not think that these people died from excessive drinking and eating; they are very robust persons and appear to eat and drink quite normally.”

אנשי מדות MEN OF GREAT STATURE (lit., of measure) — tall and high men, in speaking of whom one feels compelled to give their size, as is stated, for instance, with reference to Goliath (I Samuel 17:4): “his height was six cubits and a span” . Similar to this phrase are: (II Samuel 21:20) “a man of great stature"; (I Chronicles 11:23) “a man of great stature.

IT IS A LAND THAT EATETH UP THE INHABITANTS THEREOF; AND ALL THE PEOPLE THAT WE SAW IN IT ARE MEN OF GREAT STATURE. If a land is bad and has scanty and poor water so that the Land miscarrieth,⁷³II Kings 2:19. it does not sustain men of great [physical] stature, and its inhabitants are weak and flabby, small in size and lacking in strength! [So the question appears in what way is the spies’ statement that the Land produces men of great stature an evil report?] But the evil report of the spies consisted in saying that the Land has an overpowering atmosphere and a heavy nature, and its water and fruits are thick and heavy, so that [the fruits] grow to a very large size, such that people of an average temperament cannot take them, unless they are giants and men of powerful build who are naturally strong and exceptional in their height and stature. Therefore the Land supports very tall men but brings [premature] death to the rest of the people, as is the nature of coarse foods. The spies then continued and emphasized the strength of the giants, for at first they said, and moreover, we saw the children of Anak there,⁵³Verses 27-28. and now they exaggerated and called them nephilim [a word which implies that they were so enormous that the hearts of those who saw them “fell” through fear]; saying to the people, and there we saw the Nephilim, the three⁷⁴Ahiman, Sheshai, and Talmai (Verse 22). sons of Anak who are of the ancient Nephilim⁷⁵Verse 33. about whom you have heard, for the same were the mighty men that were of old, the men of renown.⁷⁶Genesis 6:4. And since the nature of the Nephilim who lived in the times of Noah was known throughout the world, the spies mentioned that these sons of Anak were their descendants, in order to frighten them, and to terrify them.⁷⁷II Chronicles 32:18. Therefore the spies said now, and we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight.⁷⁵Verse 33.

ארץ אוכלת יושביה היא וכל העם אשר ראינו בתוכה אנשי מדות, “it is a land which consumes its inhabitants, and all the people we saw therein were of enormous proportions.” Nachmanides writes that the spies described the land and its water as health hazards, causing premature births of fetuses and instead of the people who were of outsize dimensions having outsize children, their children were obviously poorly, undersized and below average stature. They tried to convince their peers that the land of Canaan, by reason of its climate, can support only giants, not average sized human beings such as the Israelites. It was not surprising therefore that that land produced giants, as its fruit, its produce, was such that only giants and supermen could assimilate its waters and its produce in their bodies successfully. When previously they had described the presence of giants in that land as limited to singular sightings, now they described the inhabitants as all being giants, אנשי מדות. They took pains to trace the origins of these giants to prehistoric (pre-deluge) eras, implying that they had already then been so powerful that they had survived the deluge without being in Noach’s Ark. (verse 33)