The Sin of the Spies and the Decree of the Ninth of Av

A little over a year after the Exodus the people stood at the gates of the Land. Moses sent twelve men, one per tribe, all heads of households, to see the country. Ten of the twelve talked the people out of going up. They travelled forty days and came back carrying a cluster of grapes on a pole between two of them. The report began truthfully: the land flows with milk and honey, here is its fruit. Then came the small word efes, however: the people are strong, the cities fortified to the sky, and there are giants there—we were in our own eyes like grasshoppers, and so we were in theirs. Only Caleb son of Jephunneh and Joshua son of Nun objected. The people wept all night. The decree followed: a year for each day of scouting—forty years; the whole generation over twenty would die in the wilderness and their children would enter. Tradition places that night of weeping on the ninth of Av: you wept for nothing, I shall give you a weeping for the generations.

Here the chronologies differ not by years but by a century. Seder Olam Rabbah places the Exodus in 1313 BCE. The prevailing academic date is the thirteenth century, the time of Ramesses II: its firm anchor is the stele of Pharaoh Merneptah of 1208 BCE, the first mention of Israel outside the Tanakh, where Israel is already in Canaan. A minority of scholars holds to the fifteenth century, reckoning by the plain count of I Kings 6:1 — four hundred and eighty years from the Exodus to Solomon's Temple. The timeline shows the prevailing dating.