For Moses, seventy or eighty years was a short time. Moses himself would become 120 years old and his brother, Aaron, 123 years. But after the rebellion at Kadesh, the average Israelite lived no more than seventy of eighty years. They died prematurely, instead of reaching a “ripe old age.” Despite this, Moses complained, their “span is but toil and trouble.” “Span” may instead be read as “pride.” Even the best things in life, things of which the Israelites could rightfully be proud (like the majestic, redemptive fact of the exodus from Egypt) are filled with labour and sorrow. Moses was confronted daily by the fulfillment of the prophetic words in Numbers 14:32–34: “But as for you, your dead bodies shall fall in this wilderness. And your children shall be shepherds in the wilderness forty years and shall suffer for your faithlessness, until the last of your dead bodies lies in the wilderness. According to the number of the days in which you spied out the land, forty days, a year for each day, you shall bear your iniquity forty years, and you shall know my displeasure.”
10 The years of our life are seventy, or even by reason of strength eighty; yet their span is but toil and trouble; they are soon gone, and we fly away.