Earth Opens Like a Funnel for Korah's Camp
Korah came at Moses through the family gate. When the ground finally tilted it took his tents, his flocks, and a needle he had lent out.
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The Cousin Who Already Had the Keys
Korah son of Izhar carried the holy things of the sanctuary on his shoulder. So did his cousins. That was the whole trouble. A walled city can be held against an enemy camped outside it, but a brother who turns has already been handed the keys, and Korah knew which tent flaps opened after dark and which men in Levi were still counting the honors that had gone to somebody else.
He went first to Datan and Aviram, sons of Eliav, who came out of Reuben carrying a grievance older than the wilderness. On son of Pelet walked in with them and, at some hour nobody wrote down, walked out again. Then came two hundred fifty chieftains of the assembly, men with names, men summoned to the council. By the time they reached Moses the complaint had been polished until it shone like piety.
"The whole community is holy, every one of them, and the Lord is among them," Korah said. "Why do you raise yourselves above the assembly?"
Moses went down on his face in the sand.
Two Hundred Fifty Censers at Dawn
He stood up with a test. Every man was to take his fire pan, lay incense on the coals, and carry it to the door of the Tent in the morning, and the Lord would choose between them. Then Moses turned on the Levites standing in the crowd and asked whether it was a small thing to be drawn near and trusted with the carrying of God's dwelling, that they wanted the priesthood on top of it.
He sent messengers down to Datan and Aviram. The messengers came back with five words that went through the camp like cold water. "We will not come up." Egypt was the land flowing with milk and honey, the two of them said, and Moses had hauled them out of it to bury them in a desert, and had given them no field and no vineyard. Moses was very angry. "I have not taken one donkey from them," he said. "I have not wronged a single one of them."
At first light the censers came. Two hundred fifty men stood holding fire in their hands at the door of the Tent, and Korah gathered the whole congregation to watch them do it.
If They Die the Death of All Men
Moses put his own office on the table. If these men died the way every man dies, of fever or of age or of a fall, then the Lord had not sent him, and the camp could say so out loud and be right. But if the Lord made something the world had not seen before, and the ground opened its mouth and swallowed them with everything that was theirs, and they went down alive, then Israel would know exactly whom these men had spurned.
He had barely finished the sentence.
The Ground Became a Funnel
The doors of the deep drew their bolts back. Rabbi Yehuda said the earth opened in many places at once, since the tearing ran through the middle of all Israel and Korah's people were scattered across the camp. Rabbi Nehemya answered him that Scripture says mouth, one mouth, and then gave a worse picture. The ground tilted. Wherever one of them happened to be standing the soil sloped away under him, and he rolled, and the rolling carried him to the one opening. A man could run and the running took him downhill.
They went down alive. That is what the camp could not unsee afterward. Not bodies lowered with honor and covered over, but men still breathing, still shouting, watching the sky narrow to a strip and then to a seam, while Israel stood on the rim and then fled from the sound they made.
Even the Needle He Had Lent Out
The earth took the property too, the tents and the flocks and the household goods that stand a man on his feet. Then the rabbis pushed the accounting further than the verse. A cloak of Korah's left at the launderer's, streets away and in another man's hands, rolled out of the basket and went. Rabbi Shmuel bar Nahmani said even a needle. One needle, borrowed by some Israelite who had nothing to do with any of it, lying in a stranger's sewing that morning, lifted itself and went down after its owner.
Fire came out and ate the two hundred fifty who were still holding their censers.
Centuries later Rabbi Yehuda ben Beteira refused to let the seam be the end of them. They were lost from the midst of the assembly, he said, and lost is the word David chose when he asked to be sought like a straying sheep. Whatever is lost is going to be looked for. And Hannah at Shiloh, singing over the son she had begged out of heaven, prayed for them without ever knowing their names: the Lord kills and gives life, He lowers to the pit and He raises up.
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