Whose idea was it to send the spies to scout the land of Israel?

Question

In Numbers 13 we are told that God commanded Moshe to sends the twelve spies to scout out the land:

1 And the LORD spoke unto Moses, saying:
2 'Send thou men, that they may spy out the land of Canaan, which I give unto the children of Israel; of every tribe of their fathers shall ye send a man, every one a prince among them.'

Later, in Deuteronomy 1, Moshe recounts that the people asked for this and he agreed:

22 And ye came near unto me every one of you, and said: 'Let us send men before us, that they may search the land for us, and bring us back word of the way by which we must go up, and the cities unto which we shall come.'
23 And the thing pleased me well; and I took twelve men of you, one man for every tribe;

Is there a way to reconcile these from the text of the Tanakh? Is there an interpretation whereby they're both true, or must we assume that Moshe is not telling it exactly the way it happened?

Answer 1

Could not the Lord have "instigated" the people to spy the land through indirect means, and therefore solve the conundrum?

For example, Satan incited David to number the Israelites in a census (1 Chr 21:1), but in 2 Sam 24:1 it is the Lord who is the subject of the Hebrew verb סוּת, and therefore in the immediate grammatical context it was the Lord who had incited David to number the people. Through secondary means, David's faith was tested by God's permission.

The Lord said that he "ruined Job without cause" (Job 2:3), but in fact it was Satan who was the agent of ruining Job. Through secondary means, Job's faith was tested by God's permission.

Jesus was tempted by Satan, because he (Jesus) was "led around by the Holy Spirit in the wilderness for forty days" (Lk 4:1-2). Through secondary means, Jesus's faith was tested by God's permission.

These three parallels of testing (above) are not contradictions. Each example shows that Satan acted as the agent of cause, because the Lord had first given permission to test the faith of the persons involved.

When the Israelites spied out the land, their reconnaissance report back at base camp resulted in outrage and hostility against Moses. That is, the original idea for sending spies into the land was the ostensible desire of the people to see what had awaited them ahead in the Promised Land, but it was also the Lord's explicit command that those same spies be sent out. Through secondary means, the Israelites' faith was tested by God's permission.

There is no mention in the Bible that Satan tempted the people to spy out the land, but the principle still stands in parallel to the examples above. That is, while the Lord provides explicit permission for testing, there are the ostensible secondary means by which these events actually happen.