I will strike them with pestilence and dispossess them, and I will make of you a nation greater and mightier than they.

But Moses said to Jehovah, Then the Egyptians will hear of it, for by Your might You brought this people up from their midst,

And they will tell the inhabitants of this land. They have heard that You, Jehovah, are in the midst of this people; for You, O Jehovah, are seen in plain sight, and Your cloud stands over them, and You go before them in a pillar of cloud by day and in a pillar of fire by night.

Now if You put this people to death as one man, then the nations that have heard the report about You will speak, saying,

Because Jehovah was not able to bring this people into the land which He swore to give them, He has therefore slaughtered them in the wilderness.

And now, I pray, let the power of the Lord be great, just as You have spoken, saying,

Jehovah is slow to anger and abundant in lovingkindness, forgiving iniquity and transgression; but He will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children to the third and the fourth generations.

Pardon, I pray, the iniquity of this people according to the greatness of Your lovingkindness, just as You have forgiven this people from Egypt even until now.

Then Jehovah said, I have pardoned them according to your word;

But as surely as I live, and as all the earth will be filled with the glory of Jehovah,

None of those men who have seen My glory and My signs, which I did in Egypt and in the wilderness, yet have tried Me these ten times and have not listened to My voice,

Shall see the land which I swore to give to their fathers, nor shall any of those who despised Me see it.

Only My servant Caleb, because he had a different spirit and has fully followed Me, will I bring into the land which he entered; and his descendants shall take possession of it.

Now since the Amalekites and the Canaanites dwell in the valleys, turn tomorrow, and set out into the wilderness by the way that leads to the Red Sea.

Then Jehovah spoke to Moses and to Aaron, saying,

How long shall I bear with this evil assembly, which murmurs against Me? I have heard the murmurings of the children of Israel, which they are making against Me.

Say to them, As I live, declares Jehovah, just as you have spoken in My ears, so will I do to you.

Your corpses shall fall in this wilderness, and none of you who were numbered, according to the number you counted from twenty years old and upward, who have murmured against Me,

Shall come into the land, in which I swore to settle you, except Caleb the son of Jephunneh and Joshua the son of Nun.

But your little ones, whom you said would become plunder, I will bring in, and they will know the land which you have rejected.