Josh 14:6

“However, he [the Lord] said they should not come to that land which they had refused, as a penalty for their unbelief; but their children and wives, who had not murmured, and who, owing to their sex and age, were guiltless, should receive the promised inheritance of that land. So the bodies of those of twenty years old and upwards fell in the desert. The punishment of the rest was put aside. But they who had gone up with Joshua, and had thought fit to dissuade the people, died without delay of a great plague. Joshua and Caleb entered the land of promise together with those who were innocent by reason of age or sex. The better part, therefore, preferred glory to safety; the worse part safety to virtue. But the divine judgment approved those who thought virtue was above what is useful, while it condemned those who preferred what seemed more in accordance with safety than with what is virtuous.”

“CALEB BY PRIVILEGE REQUESTS AND OBTAINS HEBRON. (Jos 14:6-15) Then the children of Judah came unto Joshua in Gilgal: and Caleb . . . said--This incident is recorded here because it occurred while the preparations were being made for casting the lots, which, it appears, were begun in Gilgal. The claim of Caleb to the mountains of Hebron as his personal and family possessions was founded on a solemn promise of Moses, forty-five years before (Num 14:24; Deu 1:36; Jos 14:10), to give him that land on account of his fidelity. Being one of the nominees appointed to preside over the division of the country, he might have been charged with using his powers as a commissioner to his own advantage, had he urged his request in private; and therefore he took some of his brethren along with him as witness of the justice and propriety of his conduct.”

“Caleb's Inheritance. - Jos 14:6. Before the casting of the lots commenced, Caleb came to Joshua along with the sons of Judah, and asked for the mountains of Hebron for his possession, appealing at the same time to the fact, that forty-five years before Moses had promised it to him on oath, because he had not discouraged the people and stirred them up to rebellion, as the other spies that were sent from Kadesh to Canaan had done, but had faithfully followed the Lord. (Note: The grounds upon which Knobel follows Maurer and others in affirming that this account does not belong to the so-called Elohist, but is merely a fragment taken from the first document of the Jehovist, are formed partly from misinterpretations of particular verses and partly from baseless assumptions. To the former belongs the assertion, that, according to Jos 14:8, Jos 14:12, Joshua was not one of the spies (see the remarks on Jos 14:8); to the latter the assertion, that the Elohist does not represent Joshua as dividing the land, or Caleb as receiving so large a territory (see on the contrary, however, the exposition of Jos 14:13), as well as the enumeration of all kinds of words which are said to be foreign to the Elohistic document.) This occurred at Gilgal, where the casting of the lots as to take place. Caleb was not "the head of the Judahites," as Knobel maintains, but simply the head of a father's house of Judah, and, as we may infer from his surname, "the Kenizzite" or descendant of Kenaz ("the Kenizzite" here and Num 32:12 is equivalent to "son of Kenaz," Jos 15:17, and Jdg 1:13), head of the father's house which sprang from Kenaz, i.e., of a subdivision of the Judahite family of Hezron; for Caleb, the brother of Jerahmeel and father of Achzah, according to Ch1 2:42 (cf. Ch1 2:49), was the same person as Caleb the descendant of Hezron mentioned in Ch1 2:18. From the surname "the Kenizzite" we are of course not to understand that Caleb or his father Jephunneh is described as a descendant of the Canaanitish tribe of Kenizzites (Gen 15:19); but Kenaz was a descendant of Hezron, the son of Perez and grandson of Judah (Ch1 2:5, Ch1 2:18, Ch1 2:25), of whom nothing further is known. Consequently it was not the name of a tribe, but of a person, and, as we may see from Ch1 4:15, where one of the sons of Caleb is called Kenaz, the name was repeated in the family. The sons of Judah who came to Joshua along with Caleb were not the Judahites generally, therefore, or representatives of all the families of Judah, but simply members or representatives of the father's house of Judah which took its name from Kenaz, and of which Caleb was the head at that time. Caleb reminded Joshua of the word which the Lord had spoken concerning them in Kadesh-barnea, i.e., the promise of God that they should both of them enter the land of Canaan (Num 14:24, Num 14:30), and then proceeded to observe (Jos 14:7): "When I was forty years old, and was sent by Moses as a spy to Canaan, I brought back an answer as it was in my mind," i.e., according to the best of my convictions, without fear of man or regard to the favour of the people.”