Numbers 14:20-22 - Coke's Commentary on the Holy Bible

I have pardoned, &c.— That is, "At thy intercession I have spared their lives, and will not immediately destroy them; but, in testimony of my severe displeasure, this murmuring generation shall be excluded from the promised land." The next verse is so rendered as to seem to have no connection with the subject in hand. After the Lord had granted to the prayer of Moses the lives of the people, he goes on to declare, and affirms it by the most solemn oath, that none of these people shall inherit the land; but from our version of the 21st verse it appears, that the oath which the Lord swears is declarative only of his glory filling the earth. It should be rendered thus: and verily, as I live, all that land shall be filled with the glory of JEHOVAH, as surely as all these men, who have seen my glory and my miracles which I did in Egypt, and in the wilderness, &c. Numbers 14:23 shall not see the land which I sware unto their fathers, even all who have provoked me shall not see it: from which version the whole passage is clear; the Lord swearing by his self-existence, and by his determined purpose to fill the land of Canaan with his glory, that these rebellious Israelites should not inherit it; thus denouncing the severest punishment upon them, while giving to Moses the strongest confirmation possible that he would fulfil his promise, and bring the people into the land of Canaan. That this passage has been so much mistaken, arises chiefly from rendering the word ארצ aretz, by the general term earth in the 21st verse, and by land in the 23rd. Tempted me these ten times, Numbers 14:22 signifies only very often.