Much more than the first — because with the same wickedness of mind, and conformation of body and voice, these explorers now openly and plainly measured [it] out, and solicited [the people] to murmuring. For, first, they say: “We are not able to go up to this people.” How, then, was God leading them thither? Then: “because it is stronger than we.” If people be simply compared with people, this indeed is true, as is clear from the cited chapters of Deuteronomy (7, v. 1, and 9, v. 1); but if the people of the Israelites be considered together with the help and hand of God, by which it was led and protected, [it] is a wicked word. “For if God be for us, who is against us?” Third — whether what is added makes a third speech of theirs, or continues the second, or shows the sense of both first and second (for all these can be supposed without difficulty) — the text clearly says that they “detracted the land which they had viewed,” and that “before the children of Israel.” For this [word] will be better joined with that “detracted” than with the following “say,” although by their accents the Hebrews seem to disjoin [them]. For the Hebrew text can now be thus explained: “And they spread abroad among the children of Israel” — or “made to go out and flow forth unto the children of Israel” — the ill-fame of that land. Fourth: “The land devours its inhabitants.” By what reasoning, I ask? Some say it comes about from the land’s excessive goodness, and that in three ways: first, because by delights it enervated all too much, and cut short their life; second, because thence no one would wish to go out or migrate anywhere else, and so all would die at home; third, because it was coveted by all, and so [there were] continual contentions, brawls, wars, and slaughters in it. But these [things] would look not to the ill-fame which these explorers tried to sprinkle on the land, but rather to its greatest praise. Abulensis (q. 51) judges it to signify that the air of that region was sickly, noxious, and pestilent; and they suppose the spies gathered this — with whom the Jews nearly agree — because at that time God, that thus He might diminish the multitude of Israel’s enemies and prepare it [the land] easier for [Israel], had sent a very great plague upon those nations, so that, occupied with funerals and continual burials, they did not so much as attend to the explorers themselves. Now this indeed could greatly retard and call the Jews away from the entry of that land; but what trace of this plague [is there]? whence is it gathered? I would hardly believe that, if the explorers had seen so great a plague, and felt the air so infected with lethal contagion, they would go on—
(col. 161)
…[that they] would go forward so long and so far; or, if they had gone forward, would at their return enter straightway into the inmost camp, and into the middle of the Israelites massed together. For how great would that danger have been? How great the imprudence, or rashness? Cajetan hands down two [senses]. One: that it is only said that those who tarried there live a very short span of time, [and] all die at once, before the very ripeness of old age. The other: that there are giants there who, by tyranny, oppress all the rest (as Gen. 6) and utterly devour [them]. Others [say] there are perhaps not less probable ways of “devouring.” One, that these [spies] mean to mark the frequent collapses of the lands in that region. For Pliny too (bk. 2, ch. 93) says: “the earth itself, burying itself, devoured [it]” — or, if we prefer Ferdinand Pintianus’s correction, “the earth itself eats itself up.” It devoured Mt. Cibotus, a very high mountain, together with the town of Curis. And (Num. ch. 16, v. 32), in the punishment of Dathan, Korah, and Abiron: “The earth, opening its mouth, devoured them with their tents,” etc. Another, that they allude to the custom of the Egyptians, by which dead men are wont to be embalmed, and not given over to be devoured by the worms of the earth — so much so that Herodotus (bk. 2) describes a threefold ταρίχευσις [embalming/mummification] and preserving of the Egyptians: the first of the nobles and very rich; the second of the middling; the third of the poor. And because that integrity and preservation of corpses pleased the Jews — so much so that they afterward brought it into their own customs (witness St. John, ch. 23 [19]) — for that cause these [spies] tell, as a great reproach of that land, that it devours [men] not indeed living, but dead and buried and laid [in the grave]. Fifth, they say: “The people whom we beheld is of tall stature.” In Hebrew a little more forcibly: “all the people whom we saw in the midst of that land (are) men of measures” — that is, “of many and great measures” — who surpass the Israelite people in size, not by one finger or two, or a hand, but by very much. (For so too a very large house is described, Jer. 22, v. 14.) But are there not here at least two lies? — namely, that they tell of so great a size of theirs, and that they assert not merely some, but “the whole people,” to be such? Sixth, when they had spoken of the almost giant size of the whole people, yet they go on, and among these so great and vast [men] they bring forth others, who are much greater than these — so that, so to speak, they are giants among giants: “There we saw certain monsters of the sons of Enac, of the giant kind”—
(col. 161, lower / continued)
—in Hebrew: “There we saw giants, the sons of Enac, of the giants.” Seventh. Not yet enough: they now openly compare even themselves with those. “Being compared to them, we seemed as locusts.” In Hebrew, again more exaggeratedly: “And we were in our own eyes as locusts; and so we were in their eyes.” That is, both we and they judged us very small and feeble — so that, both to ourselves and to them, we would seem, like locusts only, the tiniest and most enervated manikins, whom they could trample even with their own feet, like little worms and locusts. Since, then, this whole complaint contains what the former had, and is furnished with many more and plainer lies besides, it all the more had to be resisted and contradicted by Joshua.