The punishment of the ten faithless spies in the Hebrew Bible is a single verse. The Targum Jonathan turns it into body horror: worms emerging from their navels and consuming their tongues.
The night of the spies' report, all Israel wept. The Targum adds a devastating note: "It was confirmed as a punishment that they should weep on that night in their generations." This night was the ninth of Av, and the tradition holds that because they wept without cause, God gave them cause to weep on that date forever—the destruction of both Temples.
The people proposed a staggering act: "Let us appoint a king over us for a chief, and return to Egypt." Joshua and Caleb tore their clothes and pleaded: "The strength of their power has failed from them, but the Word of the Lord will be our helper." The crowd responded by preparing to stone them.
God appeared in bright clouds and threatened to destroy the entire nation. Moses interceded with an argument built on divine reputation: if You kill them all, the nations will say it was "because there was no more strength with the Lord to bring this people into the land." God relented—but with conditions.
Everyone aged twenty and over would die in the wilderness. The wandering would last forty years, one year for each day the spies spent in Canaan. Only Caleb—who had "another spirit" in him—and Joshua would enter the land.
As for the ten spies themselves, they "died on the seventh day of the month of Elul, with worms coming from their navels, and with worms devouring their tongues." The punishment fit the crime. Their tongues had spoken the evil report. Their navels—their center, their gut—had harbored cowardice. Both were consumed.
Some Israelites tried to invade Canaan the next morning without God's approval. Moses warned them: "The Ark, the Tabernacle, and the Cloud of Glory proceed not." They went anyway. The Amalekites and Canaanites "slaughtered and destroyed them."