Also, your sons will be shepherds in the wilderness for forty years, and they will suffer for your unfaithfulness, until your bodies perish in the wilderness.
Parallel translations
- WEB Your children shall be wanderers in the wilderness forty years, and shall bear your prostitution, until your dead bodies are consumed in the wilderness.
- KJV And your children shall wander in the wilderness forty years, and bear your whoredoms, until your carcases be wasted in the wilderness.
- BSB Your children will be shepherds in the wilderness for forty years, and they will suffer for your unfaithfulness until the last of your bodies lies in the wilderness.
- NKJV And your sons shall be shepherds in the wilderness forty years, and bear the brunt of your infidelity, until your carcasses are consumed in the wilderness.
- NLT And your children will be like shepherds, wandering in the wilderness for forty years. In this way, they will pay for your faithlessness, until the last of you lies dead in the wilderness.
Scripture taken from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Scripture quotations taken from the (NASB®) New American Standard Bible®, Copyright © 1960, 1971, 1977, 1995, 2020 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission. All rights reserved. lockman.org
Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996, 2004, 2015 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.
Quick answer
The children would wander forty years as shepherds, bearing the faithlessness of their parents until the rebels died. The whole nation shared in the discipline.
Overview
For forty years the younger generation would live as nomads, suffering the consequences of their parents' unfaithfulness, here called 'prostitution' for its covenant betrayal. Sin's effects often reach beyond the sinner to those around them. Yet this season also prepared a new generation to trust and obey the LORD.
Cross-references & the web
Cross-references · 12
- Ezek 23:35“Therefore thus says the Lord Yahweh: ‘Because you have forgotten me, and cast me behind your back, therefore you also bear your lewdness and your prostitution.’”
- Num 32:13Yahweh’s anger burned against Israel, and he made them wander back and forth in the wilderness forty years, until all the generation, who had done evil in Yahweh’s sight, was consumed.
- Deut 2:14The days in which we came from Kadesh Barnea, until we had come over the brook Zered, were thirty-eight years; until all the generation of the men of war were consumed from the middle of the camp, as Yahweh swore to them.
- Ps 107:40He pours contempt on princes, and causes them to wander in a trackless waste.
- Josh 14:10“Now, behold, Yahweh has kept me alive, as he spoke, these forty-five years, from the time that Yahweh spoke this word to Moses, while Israel walked in the wilderness. Now, behold, I am eighty-five years old, today.
- Hos 9:1Don’t rejoice, Israel, to jubilation like the nations; for you were unfaithful to your God. You love the wages of a prostitute at every grain threshing floor.
- Ezek 23:45–49Righteous men will judge them with the judgment of adulteresses and with the judgment of women who shed blood; because they are adulteresses, and blood is in their hands.
- Num 5:31The man shall be free from iniquity, and that woman shall bear her iniquity.’”
- Ps 107:4They wandered in the wilderness in a desert way. They found no city to live in.
- Num 33:38Aaron the priest went up into Mount Hor at the commandment of Yahweh, and died there, in the fortieth year after the children of Israel had come out of the land of Egypt, in the fifth month, on the first day of the month.
- Jer 3:1–2“They say, ‘If a man puts away his wife, and she goes from him, and becomes another man’s, should he return to her again?’ Wouldn’t that land be greatly polluted? But you have played the prostitute with many lovers; yet return again to me,” says Yahweh.
- Deut 1:3In the fortieth year, in the eleventh month, on the first day of the month, Moses spoke to the children of Israel, according to all that Yahweh had given him in commandment to them;
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Christ at the center
In the wilderness Christ is the water from the rock, the bronze serpent lifted up that the dying might look and live (John 3:14), and the star and scepter that Balaam saw rising out of Jacob.
How Numbers 14:33 points to him is part of the one story that runs through all Scripture — meet Jesus at the heart of the web, or follow a trail that traces him from Genesis to Revelation.
Original language
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