Spies and Lies: Faithful,Courageous Israelites and Truthful Spies

Abstract

The leader of a great nation ponders the invasion of a country in the Middle East. The majority report of his intelligence agency indicates that an invasion would be a bad idea, but the leader invades anyway, citing a minority report. As predicted, the invasion runs into trouble. Later, the leader gives a distorted history of the events leading up to the war, portraying himself as blameless, and accusing the naysayers of lacking courage and faith. Of course, the leader is Moses; the incident is the Israelites’ abortive first invasion of the Promised Land; and the intelligence agency consists of twelve spies. This article presents a novel interpretation of Numbers 13—14, a hermeneutical maxim for dealing with inconsistencies between Deuteronomy and the rest of the Torah, and a political moral.