Numbers 14:11

This great intercession by Moses is one of the glorious passages of the O.T. Pleading for God to spare the Chosen Nation, despite their wickedness, and pleading no merit of the people but the goodness and honor of God as the true basis of his petition, he prevailed! The self-effacing goodness of Moses shines in this passage. God could indeed have made of Moses a people greater and mightier than Israel, but Moses sought the honor of God rather than his own personal glory.

Numbers 14:13-17 here are ungrammatical as they appear in the Hebrew text, as explained by Cook:

"The syntax of these verses is singularly broken. As did Paul when deeply moved, so Moses presses his arguments one on the other without pausing to ascertain the grammatical finish of his expressions."[11]

How else could Moses have spoken as he trembled in the fear of an impending judgment of doom upon the whole nation? The notion that such a man in such awesome fear should have paused to polish up the grammar of his prayer is, in any sober view, preposterous. Cook's view of this is infinitely higher than that of Gray who wrote:

"These verses have been gradually built up of glosses, and their broken construction and unintelligibility is due to such an origin, rather than to Moses' emotion, as some have suggested."[12]

Well, just how reasonable is a view like that? What is affirmed by it is that some, or many, of those invisible "redactors" and/or "editors" put together an "unintelligible" passage. Why? Were such authors of all those "glosses" themselves unintelligent, or blunderers, or incapable of giving a grammatical construction? Or, is not such a proposition wholly untenable? We leave the answer to any believer.

"If thou shalt kill this people as one man ..." (Numbers 14:15) carries the idea "at one stroke."[13]

Numbers 14:17-19 regarding the Divine attributes, are repeated "as somewhat of a formula from Exodus 34:6,7, and are repeated in almost liturgical fashion in a number of Biblical passages (Joel 2:13; Jonah 4:2)."[14]