The people at this point in their story had been wandering about in the wilderness for nearly forty years; at last they had been led by Moses to the very edge of the territory of Edom. Nothing lay between them and the land God had promised them except the country belonging to their kinsmen, the Edomites. You can understand how the hearts and faces of the people were flushed with eager expectation. Oh! they were so sick of that restless, weary life in the barren desert, and the pictures were called up before their eyes in their dreams at night, and in their day visions through the bright sunny hours, of those smiling vineyards, those oliveyards, and those waving cornfields in that land flowing with milk and honey, existing somewhat in fact, but very much in the imagination of those who were to be its possessors. Nothing lay between them and the actual possession and enjoyment but the country of Edom, so they sent an eager message to the king, their kinsman, asking leave to pass through the territory so that they might get at their enemies and his. The king of Edom doubted them, or he was churlish, and refused to give them passage. No doubt every brave young Hebrew warrior went to Moses at once and said, "Let us force our way through; if they will not yield us passage we shall make it for ourselves—we are able, we have the weapons, we have the spirit; let us get at the homes that are waiting for us." But then that would have been to enter into the land of promise with a bloodstain on their conscience, with a bitter, bad memory, spoiling all the joy of it; for those Edomites were their blood relations, and blood meant a vast deal in those old days—even if your brother treated you ill you must not stain your hands with his blood. To have your very living and money-making all corroded with that colour of blood of a near kinsman shed, was to get what your heart longed for, but to get it spoiled. So Moses, under Divine guidance, told them, "We must go back into the wilderness, we must make a big, roundabout march, and reach the land at some other point." Unwillingly the people agreed; they packed up all their baggage once again, put their weapons into their sheaths, turned their backs on the smiling land of Canaan, and their faces to the arid stretch of the sandy, scorched wilderness, and set out. But before they had gone very far their spirit ran short—that is what the old Hebraist says literally—their spirit ran down, they could not stand it. Man turned to man, and said, "This is too hard; more than man can endure; the thing is intolerable; Moses is blundering; let us depose our leader and choose generals of our own, and force our way across Edom into the Promised Land. What is the use of this God—this Moses who brought us out of Egypt and kept us in the wilderness all these weary years—at every new camp leaving a graveyard behind us, dying man after man, with no prospect before, no progress made, no goal reached, no land of rest attained?"