“But I said unto their children in the wilderness, Walk ye not in the statutes of your fathers, neither observe their judgments, nor defile yourselves with their idols: I am the Lord your God; walk in my statutes, and keep my judgments, and do them; and hallow my Sabbaths; and they shall be a sign between me and you, that ye may know that I am the Lord your God. Notwithstanding the children rebelled against me: they walked not in my statutes, neither kept my judgments to do them, which if a man do, he shall even live in them; they polluted my Sabbaths: then I said, I would pour out my fury upon them, to accomplish my anger against them in the wilderness. Nevertheless I withdrew mine hand, and wrought for my name’s sake, that it should not be polluted in the sight of the heathen, in whose sight I brought them forth. I lifted up mine hand unto them also in the wilderness, that I would scatter them among the heathen, and disperse them through the countries; because they had not executed my judgments, but had despised my statutes, and had polluted my Sabbaths, and their eyes were after their father’s idols.” Thus it appears that the younger generation, which God spared when he excluded their fathers from the land of promise, did, like their fathers, transgress God’s law, pollute his Sabbath, and cleave to idolatry. God did not see fit to exclude them from the land of Canaan, but he did lift up his hand to them in the wilderness, that he would give them up to dispersion among their enemies after they had entered the land of promise. Thus it is seen that the Hebrews while in the wilderness laid the foundation for their subsequent dispersion from their own land; and that one of the acts which led to their final ruin as a nation was the violation of the Sabbath before they had entered the promised land. Well might Moses say to them in the last month of his life: “Ye have been rebellious against the Lord from the day that I knew you.”[123] In Caleb and Joshua was another spirit, for they followed the Lord fully.[124] Such is the general history of Sabbatic observance in the wilderness. Even the miracle of the manna, which every week for forty years bore public testimony to the Sabbath,[125] became to the body of the Hebrews a mere ordinary event, so that they dared to murmur against the bread thus sent from heaven;[126] and we may well believe that those who were thus hardened through the deceitfulness of sin, had little regard for the testimony of the manna in behalf of the Sabbath.[127] In the Mosaic record we next read of the Sabbath as follows:—