What Does Numbers 13:26 Mean?
And they went and came to Moses, and to Aaron, and to all the assembly of the children of Israel, to the wilderness of Paran, to Kadesh; and they returned the word to them, and to all the assembly, and showed them the fruit of the land.
Key words are shown with the Hebrew or Greek and what each word meant.
Selah Decoded Version The Selah Decoded Version renders what the Hebrew and Greek words meant to the people who first heard them.
King James wording
King James Version
And they went and came to Moses, and to Aaron, and to all the congregation of the children of Israel, unto the wilderness of Paran, to Kadesh; and brought back word unto them, and unto all the congregation, and shewed them the fruit of the land.THE KEY
The scouts return with a davar, both a word and a matter, and set the land’s fruit before the congregation, joining report to visible evidence.
THE MEANING
You stand where a report reaches a whole community: the word comes back to everyone, and the land’s fruit is made visible. What has been encountered arrives as testimony and as something the eyes can inspect.
WHAT THIS UNDOES
A report is only talk, with nothing real behind it.
THE ROOT
דָּבָר
davar
GROWS FROM
דבר
To speak or declare; the noun davar can refer to a spoken word, a matter, or a thing.
The report is not cast as mere talk: the same Hebrew word can name speech and the matter itself. Beside the fruit they show, the community receives both a spoken report and visible evidence of what was encountered.
ALSO GROWS
dibber: spoke, declared
דִּבֵּר
The scouts’ report is an act of speaking that carries their encounter back to the people.
devarim: words, matters, things
דְּבָרִים
This plural preserves the word’s range: what is said and what the matter concerns belong together.
פְּרִי
peri
GROWS FROM
פרה
To bear fruit, be fruitful, or increase.
The fruit is more than something edible: its word belongs to a root of bearing and increase. What the scouts place before the congregation makes the land’s yield visible in a sample.
ALSO GROWS
parah: to bear fruit, be fruitful
פָּרָה
The verb names the land’s capacity that the displayed fruit makes tangible.
peri: fruit, produce
פְּרִי
This is the visible produce brought back as evidence of the land.
THE PATTERN
What is encountered becomes shared testimony when it is spoken and made visible.
Come and hear, all you who stand in awe of God, and I will recount what he has done for my living soul.Mary Magdalene came and brought word to the disciples that she had perceived the Lord, and that he had said these things to her.For we cannot keep from speaking what we have perceived and heard.THE THREAD
And God said, "Let the earth sprout green growth, the seed-bearing plant, and the fruit tree making fruit after its kind, whose seed is in it, upon the earth." And it was so.The word for fruit here, peri, is the same Hebrew word used for the land’s fruit in Numbers. Genesis shows fruit carrying seed within it, so the sample brought back points beyond itself to the land’s capacity to produce.
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