ספר במדבר

Numbers 13,3. “Moses dispatched them from the ‎desert of Parana at the command of Hashem;” [note ‎that the Torah writes about this both in verse 3 and again in ‎verse 17, so that exegesis for this repetition is forced upon us. ‎Ed.]Moses and his generation, predominantly part of ‎the generation of the desert, are viewed as comparable to the ‎written Torah, whereas Joshua and the people entering the Holy ‎Land with him, are viewed as comparable to the oral Torah. This ‎is also what the Talmud in Baba batra 75 referred to when ‎the sages said that the face of Moses was comparable to the sun ‎whereas the face of Joshua was comparable to the moon. The oral ‎Torah is viewed as being the vessel which received input from the ‎written Torah, just as the moon receives its light which it then ‎reflects from the sun.‎When the Torah writes here that Moses dispatched the 12 ‎men to “tour” the land of Canaan, this is an allusion to the ‎generation of the Israelites that were supposed to make their ‎home in the Holy Land, i.e. it was appropriate for these men to ‎reflect the oral Torah. Actually, seeing that, as we explained ‎repeatedly in connection with the ability of the righteous in each ‎generation being able to change G’d’s decrees, the “oral Torah” is ‎not quite the same in each generation, as the sages in each ‎generation have the power to add or change protective decrees ‎knows as ‎סיג לתורה‎ “a protective fence around Biblical decrees.” ‎This is also the reason why the Israelites who are perceived as ‎symbolic of the oral Torah count their months according to the ‎lunar calendar, the moon being symbolic of the oral Torah. ‎‎[I believe that the author wished to explain why the name ‎of Moses had to be mentioned again in this verse, seeing that he ‎had been addressed by G’d in the verse before and the subject had ‎not changed. Ed.]‎