Well, it's been a long road, but it's finally happened. Ladies and gentlemen, we have narrative!! (Insert Price is Right or Wheel of Fortune winning music here now...)
And almost immediately we get a sort of sense as to maybe why the day-to-day episodes of Israel were less important than precisely where they set up their tents in camp.
Long story short: they're still incredibly annoying, collectively.
Remember that time that God told Moses that He was just going to go on ahead because if He had to put up with the Israelites for the entire trip to Canaan, nobody would likely survive?
They've been rescued from brutal indentured labour, they've been delivered from right under the spears and wheels of the Egyptian army and they have an endless supply of food that materializes before their very eyes every morning. What do they do? They moan about not having any meat.
Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that I wouldn't be hankering for a steak or something, but the fact is that they clearly have plenty of animals kicking around. Now, most of them may indeed be in the savings pens as insurance against future sin offerings, etc, but still... They've got meat.
So they're whining about meat. A lot. To the point where Moses goes to God begging to just be killed so that he doesn't have to put up with their snivelling any longer. The Israelites are, collectively, like that kid in high school who's just so infuriating that nobody will even approach him at lunch, except instead of just avoiding him, people are either actively plotting to kill him or genuinely considering suicide as a means of escape from his inane griping. Thats... not encouraging.
Anyway, so God gives them meat, but he seems to take it as a opportunity to teach by overkill, like when a parent forces a kid to smoke a whole pack of cigarettes to instill some idea of the natural consequences of their actions, and prove once and for all the axiom of "too much of a good thing."
It doesn't work for everyone...
The one-two punch of wish fulfillment and punishment that comes with the quails is a trick one, theologically. I see two main choices: either the story as written is factual and literal - God sent the quails, then He sent a plague because he was first compassionate and then still angry - or the quails are God's (unquestionably) reluctant acquiescence to the Israelites whining pleas, and the plague is a natural consequence of being literally knee-deep in birds as far as the eye can see...
I tend to lean towards the latter, but I'll be the first to acknowledge that there's nothing textually explicit that makes me do so. I just tend to see God's laws as less arbitrary and more protectionistic of His people.
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Then we get to the spies - a gaggle of Israelites sent into the Promised Land for 40 days to case the joint - find out what kinds of fruit and trees grow there, what the locals are like, whether their urban or rural, how fortified their cities are, etc.
Turns out that the Israelites are also collectively forgetful as well as whiny. Here, we've got another entry in Israel's epic "what have you done for me lately" response to God's incredibly and awesome faithfulness and power.
The spies, predictably, find the place pretty much as God described it - good eating, fertile land, and already populated. The problem is that there are people all over the place, and apparently some of them are quite large, so the majority of the spies come back and agree to tell Moses that the place sucks so that they'll just move on.
Everyone, it turns out, except Caleb, so seems to be the only one who remembers that not only was the presence of other nations in the land all part of the original prophecy, but so is the fact that God will drive out the others and give Israel the land. But everyone else seems to have forgotten this, along with the fact that God made an utter mockery out of the central army of one of the most powerful civilizations in history, and they filed a crappy report with Moses.
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