Numbers 14:33 - Exposition

Your children shall wander. Literally, "shall pasture." רֹעִים . Septuagint, ἔσονται νεμόμενοι . It was not altogether a threat, for it implied that the Lord would be their Shepherd and would provide for their wants in their wanderings. Forty years. This period was made up by counting in the year and a half since the exodus. It was one of those many cases in which the word of God was fulfilled in the meaning and substance of it, but not in the letter. The delay which had already occurred was itself practically due to the same spirit of mutiny which had grown to a head at Kadesh; it was therefore strictly equitable to count it as part of the punishment inflicted (see on Deuteronomy 2:14 ). And bear your whoredoms. "Whoredom" had been already used ( Exodus 34:16 ) as a synonym for idolatry in its aspect of spiritual unfaithfulness, and there is no reason to depart from that well-marked meaning here. That the Jews were guilty of idolatry in the wilderness is distinctly asserted (cf. Acts 7:42 , Acts 7:43 ); and these idolatrous practices, carried on no doubt in secret, must have been a sore trial to the generation which grew up amidst them (cf. Joshua 24:14 , Joshua 24:23 ).