TheTorah.com posted - very recently - two articles on Numbers 13-14, the Account of the Scouts. Interestingly they're opposite what one might think: David Frankel the rabbi is doing a higher-criticism whilst Sarah Schwartz the lay professor is explicating the text we got.
Numbers 13-14 presents two speeches, both propagandal if that's a word. For Schwartz, the first displays Aristotelian rhetoric, which is fair-enough; but the second descends to demagoguery. Meanwhile the latter speech foreshadows Ezekiel 36:13, suggesting that they're blaspheming the Golden Tablets of Elohim. Also in the second, Caleb - paragon of the best spy of the first speech - must enlist Joshua-bar-Nun to counter the demagogues. Finally - Numbers 14:10 - the LORD Himself delivers the smackdown. And it's forty more(?) years for the rest of us!
... well, so it went in Septuagint. It had to be 42 years in the desert in that famously-harmonic text on account Numbers 13-14 seems to be an interweaving. The Priest P figured the four decades as Divine Justice for the demagogues. Another account started the wilderness-stretch earlier; so the first speech is just... a speech. LXX is a late stage of harmony but earlier stages had interposed; Joshua, for a start, serves to foreshadow Joshua's own book upcoming. It'd be interesting to see what the Samaritans made of all this (or even the Samareitikon).
As for the second speech: the people whipped up by this awful speech want to stone somebody. For Frankel, the second account is Priestly; it has no respect for other accounts. These people can aim their slings at no other than at Moses and Aaron. It's the redactor who has interposed other characters, like Joshua. Frankel would add: he's added Caleb too. Caleb, standing in for the first speech, had done some rhetoric but wasn't the liar of the second speech. Frankel figured that Numbers 14:38 was a redaction also, to spare Joshua from the wrath - and Caleb too because why-not.
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