16. I charged your judges at that time, saying, “Hear the issues between your countrymen, and judge righteously between every man and his fellow countryman, and the foreigner that is with him.
17. You shall not show partiality in judgment, but you shallhear the small as well as the great. You shall not be afraid in any man’s presence, for the judgment is God’s. The case that is too hard for you, you shall bring it to me, and I will hear it.”
18. At that time, I commanded you all the things you should do.
19. When we departed from Horeb, we went through all that great and terrible wilderness, which you saw by the way of the mountain of the Amorites, as the Lord our God commanded us, and we came to Kadesh Barnea.
20. I said to you, “You have come to the mountains of the Amorites, which the Lord our God is giving to us.
21. See, the Lord your God has set the land before you. Go up and possess it, just as the Lord, the God of your fathers, spoke to you. Do not fear or be discouraged.”
22. So all of you came near to me and said, “Let us send men before us, so that they shall scout out the land, and bring back to us word concerning what way we should go up and into what cities we shall come.”
23. The thing pleased me, and I took twelve men from you, one out of each tribe.
24. They turned and went up into the hill country and came to the Valley of Eshkol and scouted it out.
25. They took the fruit of the land in their hands, and brought it down to us, and brought us word again, and said, “It is a good land which the Lord our God is giving us.”
26. Yet you were not willing to go up, but rebelled against the commandment of the Lord your God.
27. You murmured in your tents, and said, “Because the Lord hates us, He has brought us out of the land of Egypt to deliver us into the hand of the Amorites to destroy us.
28. Where shall we go up? Our brothers have discouraged our hearts, saying, ‘The people are greater and taller than we. The cities are great and walled up to heaven. And moreover, we have seen the sons of the Anakites there.’ ”
29. Then I said to you, “Do not be terrified, or afraid of them.
30. The Lord your God who goes before you, He shall fight for you, just as all that He did for you in Egypt before your eyes,
31. and in the wilderness, where you saw how the Lord your God carried you, as a man carries his son, in all the way that you went, until you came to this place.”
32. Yet in this thing you did not believe the Lord your God,