Like Grasshoppers in Our Eyes

The story starts the way many stories in the Torah start: Hashem speaks to Moshe. Nothing has gone wrong yet. Everything in this passage that goes wrong happens later, and it happens because of what people say to each other, not because of what Hashem says here.

Worth noticing where this verse sits. It comes straight after Miriam is punished for speaking about her brother, and straight before a mission that fails through speech. The Torah rarely arranges chapters carelessly, and this one is bracketed on both sides by what a mouth can do.

The formula is standard, but it creates the central difficulty of the passage. Here the mission reads as divine instruction; Devarim 1:22 has the people initiating it - ותקרבון אלי כלכם ותאמרו נשלחה אנשים לפנינו. Rashi harmonises the two by reading the next verse as permission rather than command. Ramban prefers to read this verse straightforwardly: the people proposed it, Moshe judged it sound and Hashem then fixed the form the mission would take - one man per tribe, each of them a נשיא. Ramban’s reason for that form is worth having: Hashem wanted all the great men equally bound up in it, אולי יזכרו וישובו, perhaps they would remember and return, and failing that, so that the decree would fall evenly on the whole people. Note the dagesh in לֵּאמֹר. The ל is doubled here because the word follows מֹשֶׁה - compare 15:37 and 20:7, against Vayikra 11:1 and 25:1, where the preceding word is different and the dagesh is gone. It is one of the small Masoretic joining effects, אתי מרחיק, visible only in a pointed text.

Twelve men are picked, one from each of the twelve tribes, and each one is already an important person in his tribe. Their job is to walk through the land and look at it: what grows there, who lives there, what the towns are like. Then they come back and tell everyone. That is the whole task.

Two words to hold on to. The first is שלח לך - literally ‘send for yourself’, which Rashi famously reads as ‘that is up to you, I am not the one asking’. The second is ויתורו, to scout out. That verb comes back at the end of this same parashah in the tzitzit passage: ולא תתורו אחרי לבבכם ואחרי עיניכם - do not scout after your heart and after your eyes. Same verb, and the tzitzit passage names eyes as the thing that leads people astray. The parashah that begins with men sent to look ends with a warning about looking.

Rashi opens with the Tanchuma’s question on the juxtaposition: why is the section of the spies placed next to the section of Miriam. Because she was struck over a matter of דיבה, having spoken about her brother, and these wicked men saw it and took no lesson. He then glosses שלח לך as לדעתך - according to your own judgement; I am not commanding you; if you want to, send - since the request came from the people. Ramban devotes an unusually long passage to dismantling this. He points out that the details Moshe asks for in verses 18 to 20 are the standard questions of a campaign: which route, which cities first, open camps or fortresses. He compares Moshe at Yazer and Yehoshua at Yericho, and lays down that Scripture does not conduct its affairs by relying on miracles. Ibn Ezra glosses ויתורו simply as ויחפשו, to search out, and cites ולא תתורו - the same verb, from the tzitzit paragraph that closes this parashah. The detail worth carrying away from Ramban is what he says about כל נשיא בהם. The custom, he notes, was to send שנים אנשים מרגלים חרש, two men quietly, as Yehoshua later did; Hashem instead commanded twelve tribal princes, so that all the great men would stand equally in the outcome. Ramban offers that as the reason for the mission’s form rather than as the reason it failed - but the consequence is not hard to see. Twelve princes travelling as a public delegation come back with a report that is already public property.

The crowd has started getting loud and frightened. Kalev shushes everybody so they will listen, and then says the shortest, strongest thing in the whole story: we can go up, and we can do it. He does not say the giants are small. He does not say the walls are low. He only says that we are able.

Look closely at how Kalev wins the room, because the Gemara in Sotah says he did it by a trick. Yehoshua tried to speak first and got shouted down. So Kalev started with ‘and is this the only thing the son of Amram has done to us’ - which sounds like the opening of an attack on Moshe. The crowd went quiet to enjoy it. Then he finished the sentence: he took us out of Egypt, split the sea, brought down the manna. He got their silence under false pretences and used it to say the true thing. That is worth thinking about on its own.

Rashi gives וַיַּהַס its plain sense, השתיק את כולם, he silenced them all, and cites Sotah 35a for the manoeuvre: Kalev cried out וכי זו בלבד עשה לנו בן עמרם, and the listeners, already sour on Moshe over the spies’ words, fell silent expecting an insult. He then delivered the list - he split the sea for us, he brought down the manna, he brought us the quail. The Gemara supplies a piece Rashi leaves out: Yehoshua had tried to speak first and was shouted down as a man with a severed head, that is, one with no children, and Kalev calculated that if he opened plainly they would stop him too. Rabba there also reads ויהס against its usual sense, as הסיתן, he won them over rather than merely quieted them. On עלה נעלה Rashi records the Gemara’s reading: even to heaven, and if he tells us to make ladders and climb up there, we will succeed in everything he says. Sforno reads the scene less dramatically: Kalev silenced a crowd that was already starting to raise its voice, as it would do in full in 14:1, and he takes עלה נעלה as a judgement, that it is fitting for us to go up since they will not stand against us; the reason כבר נמוגו כל יושבי כנען, the inhabitants have already melted, he attaches to the second half, וירשנו אותה כי יכול נוכל לה. Note the two infinitive absolutes stacked in one verse, עלה נעלה and יכול נוכל. Hebrew doubles the verb for emphasis, and Kalev uses the construction twice in half a sentence. The ten will answer with the same verb undoubled and negated.

The other ten men answer with exactly the same word Kalev used, but with ‘not’ in front of it. Kalev said we are able. They say we are not able. Nothing new about the land has been discovered in between. The only thing that changed is who is talking.

This is the sentence the whole passage turns on, and it is not a description of anything. Up to here the report was checkable - the fruit was in their hands, the cities really were fortified. ‘We are not able’ is a forecast, and there is no way to bring one back from a scouting trip. The last two words are worse. The Gemara in Sotah reads ממנו not as ‘than us’ but as ‘than Him’ - stronger than Hashem, as it were, so that even the owner of the house cannot get his furniture out. Whether or not the ten meant it that way, the reading exposes what the sentence does: it quietly removes one party from the calculation.

Rashi’s comment here is four words long and carries the entire weight: כביכול כלפי מעלה אמרו - as it were, they said it upwards. He is citing Sotah 35a, where Rabbi Chanina bar Pappa says the spies spoke a serious thing at that moment: אל תקרי ממנו אלא ממנו, do not read ‘stronger than us’ but ‘stronger than Him’, as though even the householder cannot remove his own belongings. The vocalisation is identical; only the sense of the suffix changes. Note how tightly the verse is bound to Kalev’s. He said יכול נוכל; they answer לא נוכל, the same root י-כ-ל, negated. He said עלה נעלה; they answer לעלות, the same root ע-ל-ה, in the infinitive of something that will not happen. This is not a rival report. It is Kalev’s sentence with two words removed and one added, which is why it took Kalev’s audience with it. Ramban, in his long comment back on verse 2, observes that the panic was already spreading before the דיבה of the following verse, since the quarrel with Kalev happens first, and Devarim 1:28 records the people saying אחינו המסו את לבבנו.

Now they say something new and much worse: that the land itself swallows the people who live in it. When they first came back they said the land was good, and they were carrying its fruit. Nothing has happened since then except that Kalev disagreed with them.

Two things are strange about this verse. First, it contradicts what these same men said five verses earlier, in verse 27, that the land flows with milk and honey. Second, it contradicts itself: a land that eats its inhabitants would produce weak, stunted people, not giants. Ramban notices exactly that and says they were building a case rather than describing a place. Notice also the verb they use for their own mission - לתור, the same word Hashem used in verse 2. They are still using the language of the job while doing something else entirely.

Ramban makes the sharpest distinction in the passage: מוציא דיבה is the fool who says what is false, while one who reports the truth is called מביא דיבה - as in ויבא יוסף את דבתם רעה אל אביהם, Bereshit 37:2. The Torah here writes ויוציאו, and Ramban’s structural reading follows: this was said away from Moshe and Aharon, in the tents, after the earlier public report and after Kalev had argued with them. When they saw that the people were still inclined to go up, they invented. His reading of the internal contradiction is exact: a land whose water is poor and which bereaves its inhabitants does not grow אנשי מדות; it grows weak and flabby men, small in size. So the spies had to claim the opposite - that the air of the land is overpowering and its nature heavy, its water and fruit thick and coarse, so that only giants can take that diet and everyone of ordinary constitution dies. Rashi instead reads אוכלת יושביה as an honest observation put to dishonest use, citing Sotah 35a: everywhere they went they found people burying their dead, and Hashem had arranged this for their benefit, to keep the Canaanites occupied with mourning so that they would take no notice of the spies. Rava’s formulation is that Hashem said, I meant it for good and they took it for evil. On אנשי מדות Rashi glosses men so large you must state their measurement, comparing Golyat, whose height Shmuel I 17 records as six cubits and a span.

The last sentence is the one to remember. They say: next to those enormous people we felt as small as grasshoppers. And then they add something else - and that is how we looked to them too. But nobody asked the giants. The ten men are telling everyone what the giants thought, and they cannot possibly know.

The first half of this sentence is honest and even brave. We felt tiny. Anyone would have. The second half is where it goes wrong, and the Gemara in Sotah says so bluntly: granted ‘in our own eyes’, but ‘so we were in their eyes’ - from where did they know that. Something happens between the two halves of one verse. A feeling about yourself gets promoted into a fact about the world by being placed in someone else’s mouth. That move is not ancient and it is not rare. It is what happens every time you decide in advance what a room thinks of you and then behave accordingly.

Rashi identifies the נפילים as giants descended from Shamchazai and Azael who fell from heaven in the generation of Enosh, and glosses ענק as those who מעניקים חמה בקומתן - so tall that they wear the sun like a collar, ענק being a neck-ring. On the last clause he answers the Gemara’s challenge with the Gemara’s own solution: we heard them saying to one another, there are ants in the vineyards that look like men. Sotah 35a states the objection in Rav Mesharshiya’s name - the spies were liars; granted ונהי בעינינו כחגבים, but וכן היינו בעיניהם, from where could they have known - and answers that the Canaanites were eating a mourners’ meal beneath cedars, the spies climbed the trees and overheard them. Sforno takes the clause in the opposite direction: yes, we were grasshoppers in their eyes or less, and for that very reason they did not rise against us, because they thought us beneath their attention. Read that way, the same sentence is a strategic advantage the spies could not recognise. Or HaChaim goes further inward: the phrase reveals that they felt inferior even to the ordinary Canaanites who were not men of stature at all, comparing their own build to the average person they had seen. Between Rashi, Sforno and Or HaChaim the disagreement is really about which half of the verse is doing the work - whether the failure lies in what the giants thought, or in what the spies had already concluded before anyone climbed a tree.