Devarim followership.

In the last month of his life, Moses gathered the people.

He instructed them about the laws they were to keep and reminded them of their history since the Exodus.

That is the substance of the book of Devarim.

And of course, early in the process, he recalled the episode of the spies the reason the people's

parents were denied the opportunity to enter the land he wanted the next generation to learn

the lesson of that episode and carry it with them always they needed faith and courage

perhaps that's always been part of what it means to be a Jew. But the story of the

spies, as he tells it here, is very different indeed from the version in Shalachlach, which describes the

events as they happened at the time, almost 39 years later. The discrepancies between the two accounts are glaring and

numerous, but here I want to focus only on two. First, the question, who proposed sending the

spies? In Shalach, it was God who told Moses to do so. The Lord said to Moses, send men. In our parcia, it was the people who requested it.

Then all of you came to me, says Moses, and said, let us send men. So who was it? God or the people?

This makes a massive difference to how we understand the episode. Second, what was their mission?

In our parcia, the people said,

let us send men to spy out, Vyakburu the land for us. The 12 men made for the hill country,

came to the Wadi Eshkol and spied it via Raglu. In other words, our Parcha uses the two Hebrew

verbs, Lachboa and the the Ragell that mean to spy.

But as I pointed out in Covenant of Conversation on Schlach, the account there doesn't mention

spying at all. Instead, 13 times it uses the verb Latour, means to tour explore travel inspect even in our pasha

when moses is talking not about the spies but about god he says he goes before you on your journeys

latour to seek out the place where you are to encamp according to the mal Malbim, La Tour means to seek out what's good

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