I the Lord have said,.... Determined, resolved on doing what I have declared, and again repeat it; the decree is absolute and peremptory, and will never be revoked:I will surely do it to all this evil congregation, that are gathered together against me; against his ministers, Moses the chief magistrate, and Aaron the high priest; and this is interpreted gathering, conspiring, and rebelling against the Lord himself, on account of which they might be truly called an evil congregation, and therefore it was a determined point with him to destroy them:in this wilderness they shall be consumed; by wasting diseases:and there they shall die; as they wished they might, Nu 14:22; with respect to which this was so often repeated, Ex 16:3; and which the Jews interpret not only of a corporeal death, but of an eternal one; for they say "the generation of the wilderness (of those that died there) have no part in the world to come, nor shall stand in judgment, as it is said, "in this wilderness", &c.
Nu 14:35.'' Misn. Sanhedrin, c. 11. sect.