[Avodah] Shelach

[Zev Sero]

Yitzhak Grossman wrote:
> On Tue, 16 Jun 2009 07:11:55 -0400
> Zev Sero <zev at sero.name> wrote:

>> people forgot what their job was.  Malbim points out that the name
>> we give these people, "meraglim", is a misnomer.  Nowhere in the Torah
>> are they called that.  And it's not as if this was a word that didn't
>> exist at the time; Yosef accused his brothers of being "meraglim",
>> Moshe sent people "leragel et Ya`azer", and Yehoshua sent "meraglei
>> cheresh".  It's not an accident these people are called "tarim" and
>> not "meraglim", because they were *not* spies, they were tourists.
> 
> You and Malbim may feel that "meraglim" is a misnomer in this context,
> but Hazal don't seem to have agreed; at least in the Bavli, they refer
> to them numerous times as "meraglim", and never as "tarim".

I've wondered about that, but one reason could be that they imagined
themselves to be meraglim, and acted as if they were, so Chazal call
them that.   But if they really were meraglim then their report would
not have been wrong.   At any rate it's remarkable that the Torah
never once calls them meraglim.

-- 
Zev Sero                      The trouble with socialism is that you
zev at sero.name                 eventually run out of other people’s money
                                                     - Margaret Thatcher