Parshat Shelach contains a story that changes the course of the book of Numbers, just at the most exciting point. The Israelites are poised to enter the land of Israel, but before they go in Moshe sends spies to check out the land. When the spies return, their negative report causes the Israelites to spin out of control. The people become depressed, reject God and Moshe, and completely lose resolve. 

God’s response to the people is, to put it mildly, intense.  God threatens “Akenu ba'Dever v'orishenu – I will smite them with pestilence and utterly annihilate them” (Numbers 14:12). And although Moshe talks God down from the threat of wiping them out, God does end up issuing a pretty severe punishment: He condemns the generation who participated in the sin to die in the wilderness and forces them to wander in there for forty years. 

But is this harsh reaction from God really warranted? Sure, not wanting to go into the land of Israel and losing faith is worthy of punishment, but is it a grave enough sin to warrant this type of punishment? Consider the other sin of this magnitude, in the book of Exodus,  the Golden Calf. That was such a horrible sin, yet the whole generation isn’t condemned to die in the wilderness.  What was it about the sin of the spies that made God react like this? How can we possibly understand and relate to what seems to be just an arbitrarily vengeful and angry God? 

God’s Wrath in Egypt, and God’s Wrath after the Spies

To answer these questions, let's take a closer look at the words of God's reaction itself. As noted earlier, God says “Akenu ba'Dever v'orishenu” – I will strike them with pestilence and annihilate them (Numbers 14:12).  This is an oddly specific way of threatening destruction. God doesn’t just say “I’ll kill them all,”  God specifies dever, a plague. 

God isn’t using just any generic word for punishment. This word is familiar to us from the ten plagues in Egypt. Dever was the fifth plague that God brought upon Egypt when all of their livestock was killed. 

And that isn’t the only time the word Dever is used in the Exodus story.  Right after the sixth plague of boils, God says something fascinating to Pharaoh. “Now I'm going to send My hand against you; I could have destroyed you and your people with pestilence - dever-  and wiped you off the face of the earth.” What’s fascinating about this usage of dever is that it’s used in the exact way as God uses it regarding the Israelites after the sin of the spies, threatening to totally destroy the people with this dever plague. 

Putting this all together, it seems as if God, when he threatens to wipe out the people for their lack of faith in the sin of the spies, is threatening annihilation using the same punishments he used against the Egyptians!  And if the punishments are the same…is that because the sins are the same?  That might seem like a crazy suggestion. The Egyptians are the great villains of the book of Exodus! How can the sins of the spies possibly be similar to what Egypt did, that both sins would warrant a similar reaction from god? 

In this video, Rabbi David Block compares God’s threat in the wake of the sin of the spies to God’s threats against Egypt and demonstrates how the connection can help us see the true gravity of the sin of the spies, and why it warranted a complete turning point in the national story, and help us understand what God was trying to accomplish by forcing the Israelites two wander in the desert for forty years.