Verse 23. - Surely they shall not see. אִםאּיּרְאוּ, "if they shall see," according to the usual Hebrew idiom. Cf. Psalm 107:11 (Septuagint), Hebrews 4:3, ὡς ὤμοσα... εἰ εἰσελεύσονται.

14:20-35 The Lord granted the prayer of Moses so far as not at once to destroy the congregation. But disbelief of the promise forbids the benefit. Those who despise the pleasant land shall be shut out of it. The promise of God should be fulfilled to their children. They wished to die in the wilderness; God made their sin their ruin, took them at their word, and their carcases fell in the wilderness. They were made to groan under the burden of their own sin, which was too heavy for them to bear. Ye shall know my breach of promise, both the causes of it, that it is procured by your sin, for God never leaves any till they first leave him; and the consequences of it, that will produce your ruin. But your little ones, now under twenty years old, which ye, in your unbelief, said should be a prey, them will I bring in. God will let them know that he can put a difference between the guilty and the innocent, and cut them off without touching their children. Thus God would not utterly take away his loving kindness.Surely they shall not see the land which I sware unto their fathers,.... Not possess and enjoy the land of Canaan, which the Lord by an oath had promised their fathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, to give it to their seed; and now he swears that these men, who had so often tempted him, and been disobedient to him, should not inherit it; so the Targums of Jonathan and Jerusalem take it for an oath; see Hebrews 3:11,

neither shall any of them that provoked me see it; that provoked him by the ill report they had brought of the land, by their unbelief, by their murmurings, and mutiny.