Moses Sent Priests to Receive Gifts and Spies to Scout the Land

The first mission was about receiving

Before the spies, before the forty days of desert punishment, Moses was teaching Israel how to give. Numbers 5:9 states the rule simply: every gift of all the sacred items of the children of Israel, which they present to the priest, shall be his. One verse, a brief instruction about priestly portions.

The rabbis who compiled Bamidbar Rabbah read it as an economy in miniature. Every gift catches an enormous net. Teruma from the grain harvest. Halla, the portion of dough lifted off the bread before baking. The hides of sacrificed animals. Firstborn beasts. The five shekels of pidyon haben, the ransom paid for a firstborn son. The redemption price for a firstborn donkey. The first fruits carried up to Jerusalem in decorated baskets by farmers who had been waiting all year to make the walk.

The word that means sacrifice

The rabbis paused on a strange word in the verse. The Torah says the Israelites will yakrivu the gifts to the priest, and yakrivu can mean both present and sacrifice. Rabbi Yishmael asked the question out loud: "does anyone sacrifice teruma?" You do not burn first fruits on an altar. You hand them to a priest. So why does the Torah use a word that means sacrifice?

His answer was about approach. When you give a sacred portion, the act of bringing it close is itself the sacrifice. The hand that lifts the grain and walks it to the priest is doing something the altar fire does from a different angle. The messenger who carries sacred portions to the one who receives them is already doing sacred work.

The second mission started in the south

Moses sent twelve men to scout the land of Canaan. "Ascend there in the south, and ascend the highland," he told them. It sounded like a logistics assignment. Go and see the land. Come back with a report.

The rabbis of Bamidbar Rabbah 16 remembered what they found in the highland. Three children of giants: Ahiman, Sheshai, and Talmai. The text gave their names and then, in midrashic fashion, the rabbis cracked those names open. Ahiman meant my brother is from us, as if the giant were claiming kinship with the spies themselves, absorbing them by name into a relationship they could not refuse. Sheshai's name pointed to the whiteness of the ground his footprints made, enormous impressions that turned the dust pale. Talmai's name said he plowed furrows in the earth with his walking.

The giants did not have to attack the spies. The spies attacked themselves. They looked at the furrows in the earth and felt themselves become grasshoppers. They compared their own size to the size of what they saw and performed the arithmetic of defeat in front of a jury of their own fear.

Two kinds of messengers

The contrast the midrash drew was stark. The priests who received sacred portions came back with their hands full of what Israel had given and what God had commanded. The spies who scouted Canaan came back with a report that was technically accurate and entirely wrong. The land was real. The giants were real. The walled cities were real. And all of it was supposed to be irrelevant, because the God who rained bread from the sky and split the sea was the same God who had promised the land.

The priests understood their mission as receiving what was already flowing. The spies understood their mission as assessment, as if the question of whether to enter the land was still open. Moses had not sent them to decide. He had sent them to see. They returned having decided, and their decision cost Israel forty years.