Another Spirit

The camp is awake all night, and the noise is not fear so much as arithmetic. Would God that we had died in the land of Egypt, and then the practical version, Let us make a captain, and let us return into Egypt. Two men stand in front of them with their clothes torn, saying the land is an exceeding good land, and the answer comes back: all the congregation bade stone them with stones.

One of the two is Caleb, and he is forty years old. He had walked the same country as the ten who came back frightened, seen the same fortified towns and the same tall men, and brought back no different report. He drew a different conclusion, and God's account of why is short: because he had another spirit with him, and hath followed me fully.

Then the sentence on everybody else. Your carcases shall fall in this wilderness. Caleb is exempted from the dying and not from the walking. He does the forty years too, for a verdict he argued against in public, burying the people who voted for it one funeral at a time.

He gets his hearing at last in Joshua, and he has kept the numbers. Forty years old was I when Moses the servant of the LORD sent me from Kadeshbarnea. The LORD hath kept me alive, as he said, these forty and five years, even since the LORD spake this word unto Moses, while the children of Israel wandered in the wilderness: and now, lo, I am this day fourscore and five years old. Then he asks for the country nobody wanted, naming what had frightened everyone: Now therefore give me this mountain, whereof the LORD spake in that day; for thou heardest in that day how the Anakims were there.

Forty at Kadesh. Eighty five at Hebron. Forty five years in between, most of them spent crossing a desert he had voted against entering, and there is nothing to be added to a number.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year one reading for day 277 is Never Confounded (1 Peter 2:6).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna, Year Two