Why Entering the Land of Israel Is Always Called Going Up

You cannot go into the Land of Israel in the Hebrew Bible. You can only go up.

This is not a metaphor invented by later poets. It is a grammatical fact embedded in the oldest layers of the text. When Caleb stands before a terrified assembly and urges them forward, he says, let us go up and inherit it (Numbers 13:30). When the scouts fan out across Canaan, the text says they went up and spied out the land (Numbers 13:21). Even centuries earlier, when Joseph's brothers made their way back to Canaan from Egypt, the text uses the same verb: they went up from Egypt and came to the land of Canaan (Genesis 45:25).

Egypt is lower than Canaan in terms of actual elevation, so the geography fits in one direction. But the Sifrei Devarim, the ancient tannaitic commentary on Deuteronomy compiled in the early centuries of the Common Era, pushes further. It assembles these three verses together and makes a bold claim: the Land of Israel is literally higher than all other lands on earth. Every journey there is an ascent, not by convention but by nature.

What the Spies Saw and What They Reported

The Sifrei does not stop with elevation. It turns to a harder question. When the scouts returned from Canaan and stood before Moses and the assembly, the text eventually records that the people said, the land that the Lord our God gives us is good (Deuteronomy 1:25). A simple positive report. But wait, the Sifrei asks, did they actually say this? Did they not speak evil of the land?

The answer is uncomfortable. Most of them did speak evil. Ten of the twelve scouts brought back a report designed to paralyze. Giants in the land. Walled cities that reached the sky. We were like grasshoppers in their eyes (Numbers 13:33). The assembly wept through the night and talked about returning to Egypt. The only two voices that held firm were Joshua and Caleb, who tore their garments and pleaded with the people not to be afraid.

So when the Sifrei quotes the verse that calls the land good, it is quoting the minority. Joshua and Caleb said it. The rest did not. And even their courageous testimony was not enough. As Deuteronomy records plainly: you did not desire to go up, and you opposed the word of the Lord your God (Deuteronomy 1:26).

The Geography of Faithfulness

Here is what the Sifrei is pointing at. The physical ascent into the Land of Israel and the spiritual act of faithfulness required to enter it are not separate things. They are the same motion described in two registers.

To say the land is good when the evidence around you looks terrifying is already an ascent. To say let us go up when the majority are weeping and packing for Egypt is to have climbed something before taking a single step. Joshua's entire life was one long practice of this kind of going up, a willingness to see the situation as it actually was rather than as fear painted it.

The scouts who brought the evil report were not cowards in any simple sense. They were experienced men, chosen for their strength. But they looked at the land and could only see what might be lost. They could not look up. And that inability to look up, to ascend even in imagination, is what kept them walking in circles for forty years. As the Sifrei Devarim, composed in the school of Rabbi Ishmael, understood it, the refusal to ascend is not a failure of nerve. It is a failure of vision.

Why We Still Say Aliyah

The word for immigrating to Israel is aliyah, which means going up. It is used regardless of which direction a person is actually traveling. Someone moving from the mountains of northern Europe to the coastal plain of Tel Aviv is still said to be going up. Someone flying from the high-altitude plateau of Ethiopia is still making aliyah. The physical direction is irrelevant. The word preserves the theology.

The Sifrei Devarim, a collection of over 900 legal and narrative interpretations on Deuteronomy, understands this instinctively. The land is higher. The journey to it is always an ascent. And an ascent requires something more than legs. It requires the courage to say, as Joshua and Caleb said it, standing in front of a weeping assembly: the land is good. Even now. Especially now.

That is not optimism. It is not wishful thinking. It is the act of seeing clearly, of refusing to let fear distort the view. And the text honors it by giving it the same word as going up, as ascending, as climbing toward what is highest.

What Joseph Knew Before the Scouts Were Born

There is one more detail worth holding. The Sifrei grounds its whole argument partly in Genesis 45:25, the verse about Joseph's brothers going up from Egypt to Canaan. That journey happened generations before the spies were sent. Before the scouts, before Caleb's defiant speech, before Joshua's long military campaigns to take the land, there was already a going up from Egypt to Canaan embedded in the family history.

Joseph had lived his entire adult life in Egypt, had fed nations during a famine, had become the most powerful man in Pharaoh's court, and still the text called the return journey an ascent. As if to say: no matter how long you have been in the lower place, the direction home is always up. The language was already waiting for Joshua and Caleb to claim it.