Joshua 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.

And let us see who it is that first received an inheritance from Jesus. "Caleb," it says, "the son of Jephunneh." For he is the first to ask, and he asks with certain definite reasons and words, which are written down; and these words can also instruct us unto salvation. First of all, Caleb is interpreted as "heart." Who then is, as it were, a heart, if not the one who in all things devotes his effort to the understanding, who is said to be no other member of the body of the church than that which is more excellent in us, the heart — that is, one who conducts all things with reason and prudence, and so administers everything as though he were nothing other than a heart? Now Jephunneh, his father, is interpreted "conversion." This Caleb, then, is the son of conversion; and why, unless because, having been turned to God, he brings forth from himself such fruit that the heart begets a son? Everyone, therefore, who has leisure for divine perceptions and does all things prudently and rationally is a Caleb. He, first indeed instructed by Moses, but secondly by Jesus, whom he attended, says: "you know the word which the Lord spoke to Moses the man of God." "You know the word which the Lord spoke." For who else can "know the word which the Lord spoke to Moses" except Jesus alone? No one understood the law as Jesus taught it; for he himself taught and opened up all things, he himself revealed to Paul that "the law is spiritual." "As he spoke," it says, "concerning me and concerning you." "Concerning me," it says, "and concerning you Moses spoke." "Concerning you" — this is what the Lord said: "if you believed Moses, you would surely also believe me; for he wrote of me." But when he said "concerning me" — that is, concerning Caleb, who is the heart — it is certain that Moses wrote concerning the heart, seeing that he wrote everything prudently and wisely. He says therefore: "today I am as strong as I was strong then." For the holy man is likewise "strong" both in things present and in things past, both in the new and in the old, both in the gospels and in the law. This, then, is what he says, that "he is strong today" under Jesus "as he was then" under Moses, because in the mysteries of both testaments the watchful heart is strong.