For the children of Israel were wandering in the waste land for forty years, till all the nation, that is, all the fighting-men, who had come out of Egypt, were dead, because they did not give ear to the voice of the Lord: to whom the Lord said, with an oath, that he would not let them see the land which the Lord had given his word to their fathers to give us, a land flowing with milk and honey.

I was forty years old when Moses, the servant of the Lord, sent me from Kadesh-barnea to make a search through the land; and the account which I gave him was in keeping with his desire.