Tim Maas Supporter Retired Quality Assurance Specialist with the U.S. Army

"Stiff-necked" is a metaphor that is used multiple times in the Bible. It derives from a habit of the camel (a common beast of burden and transportation in biblical times) of preventing or hindering its use for those purposes by refusing to bend its neck to facilitate loading it with cargo, or mounting it to ride it. Applied to humans, it describes a sinful attitude of pride, stubbornness, or rebellion, as opposed to the virtues of humility, faith, and obedience.

It was such an attitude that caused God to condemn the Israelites to forty years of wandering in the Sinai wilderness because of such incidents as constructing a golden calf to worship when Moses was communing with God on Mount Sinai, and also refusing to enter Canaan immediately after their exodus from Egypt because of the Israelites' fear of the nations that lived there, despite Israel's knowledge of the manner in which God had fought for them during the exodus.

(The Bible also records multiple similar rebellions during this period, which Moses summarized in the same chapter cited in the question (Deuteronomy 9).)

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