Deuteronomy 2:7

‘And your sons shall be shepherds for forty years in the wilderness, and they will suffer for your unfaithfulness, until your corpses come to an end in the wilderness.

“Then we set out from Horeb and went through all that great and fearsome wilderness which you saw on the way to the hill country of the Amorites, just as Yahweh our God had commanded us; and we came to Kadesh-barnea.

“So you remained in Kadesh many days, according to the days that you remained there.

“Now the time that it took for us to come from Kadesh-barnea until we crossed over the brook Zered was thirty-eight years, until all the generation of the men of war came to an end from within the camp, as Yahweh had sworn to them.

For the sons of Israel had walked forty years in the wilderness, until all the nation, that is, the men of war who came out of Egypt, were completely destroyed because they did not listen to the voice of Yahweh, to whom Yahweh had sworn that He would not let them see the land which Yahweh had sworn to their fathers to give us, a land flowing with milk and honey.

“Indeed, forty years You sustained them in the wilderness, and they did not lack; Their clothes did not wear out, nor did their feet swell.

They wandered in the wilderness along the way of the wasteland; They did not find an inhabited city.

“Go and call out in the ears of Jerusalem, saying, ‘Thus says Yahweh, “I remember concerning you the lovingkindness of your youth, The love of your betrothals, Your walking after Me in the wilderness, Through a land not sown.

I Myself knew you in the wilderness, In the land of drought.

“And it was I who brought you up from the land of Egypt, And I led you in the wilderness forty years That you might take possession of the land of the Amorite.