NOTES for Num 14:1-45
The people's reaction to the scouts' words is quite typical: it is the reaction of a crowd dominated by collective consciousness - or rather, the collective unconscious. The people's main problem in this situation was that they had not yet become a people, remaining for now only a crowd of fugitives. They had managed to escape the Egyptians' pursuit - and they perceived this good fortune as a miracle of God, which it in fact was; but they were entirely unprepared to show any activity of their own except one thing: running from any danger as quickly and as far as possible. Running even back to that very Egypt from which, only recently, they had barely managed to get away - and this is understandable, since a crowd lives for one day, and not even for a day but for a minute, so that its mood can change at any moment. Now the crowd was frightened by the scouts' report, and this new fear completely pushed out of its collective memory all the fears that had tormented it in Egypt. Egypt now began to look like salvation; the Egyptian fears ceased to be current, while new fears inspired by the scouts' stories became current.
In such a condition, no war could be discussed. To fight, one must be a people, not a crowd, if only because an army must consist of people who are at least minimally self-aware. Without such awareness, a person cannot resist any fear, which means he will run from the slightest danger, real or imagined. It was all the more impossible in such a condition to follow God, without which the conquest of the land was altogether unthinkable. To follow God, far more awareness is needed than is required simply not to give in to fear and not to run from the first danger. The people were ready for neither one nor the other. They were so unready that among them only two were ready to fight.
Two out of the whole multitude saw the situation as it really was. Two - because the crowd's later impulse to fight after the rebuke was not an act of repentance or some sudden conversion. It was only a new impulse replacing the previous one. The wind changed, and the crowd was carried in the opposite direction - only it did not stop being a crowd because of that. Now forty years had to pass - a year for a day - for the crowd to become a people.