Korach Paid Four Coins Then Watched Her Lose

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The First Shearing

The widow owned one ewe, and the wool was still warm in her hands when Aaron came and took the first of it.

The law was on his side. The premier part of the shearing of your sheep you are to give him (Deuteronomy 18:4), and a single ewe is a flock for the purposes of that verse. She went and wept in front of Korach and told him what Aaron had done, so Korach went and found the priest.

"What have you done to this poor woman, to take her wool? Give it back to her."

"It is mine according to the Torah," Aaron said, and quoted the verse.

Korach counted out four silver coins and put them in her hand, because that was the tool he had, and then he watched her take them and go home to a shorn ewe standing in an empty yard. He went off angry.

Three Hundred Mules of Keys

He could afford the gesture. His storehouses needed three hundred mules to carry nothing but the keys to them, and the silver inside came neither from inheritance nor from trade. It was the money Joseph had taken in across seven years of famine, which had filled three towers, each of them a hundred cubits deep and a hundred cubits wide. Joseph handed every coin of it to Pharaoh's house and left his own children less than five pieces of silver, since he would not touch what he was holding in trust. Korach found one of those towers, and after that he was a proud man. A foreign king would find the second one. The third is still sitting where it was put, kept for the World to Come.

None of it had been any use in the widow's yard. He had bought four coins' worth of quiet and had not moved the verse an inch.

The Lamb, and Then the Knife

The ewe gave birth to a male, and Aaron heard about it and came and took the lamb, because every firstling born in your flock and in your herd, the male, you are to hallow to the Lord your God (Deuteronomy 15:19).

She was back at Korach's tent before the day was out, crying. He went to Aaron a second time and asked what he wanted with this widow, taking the son of her ewe, and Aaron said the verse without raising his voice, so Korach walked away full of anger again.

Then the widow did the arithmetic herself. As long as the animal was alive it would keep producing things the priesthood could claim, so she sent and had it slaughtered before it could give him anything else. Aaron came for the shankbone, the jawbone, and the rough stomach, which belong to the priest under another verse (Deuteronomy 18:3). Korach asked him whether everything he had already taken had not been enough. Aaron said the verse.

She still had meat on the board. She stood over it and devoted it by oath, setting it aside so that it would be past ordinary reach, but everything specially devoted in Israel is his (Numbers 18:14). Aaron heard, and came, and took the meat.

She had nothing left to lose by then. Four silver coins sat in her house, and nothing else did.

To the Morrow, Judgment

Korach did not go to Aaron a fifth time. He went to Moses. "Why have you, son of Amram, established authority over us, and been raised up over us?"

"To the morrow, judgment," Moses said.

In the morning Korach had two hundred and fifty men behind him holding fire pans and burning incense, so Moses stood in front of the Holy One and asked whether the prophecy he had been carrying was true. It was true. Moses asked that these men not die the ordinary death that comes to everybody, so that nobody could mistake what had happened, and he was given what he asked for. The ground opened, took them down to the navel, and held them there.

"Moses! Moses! Have mercy on us!"

"Too much is yours, sons of Levi" (Numbers 16:7). Then the earth closed over Korach and his household, and fire came out and burned the two hundred and fifty men who were holding the pans.

The Gates Came Down to Him

Under the ground, in the dark, Korach and the men with him worked out their situation and agreed on it. Whoever else came up at the end of days, they would not. They had gone down alive and the earth had shut over them, and there was no verse anywhere that covered it.

Hannah came and prophesied over them, singing that the Lord brings death and gives life, lowers to Sheol (the pit of the dead) and raises up (1 Samuel 2:6). They heard her and did not believe her.

Then Jerusalem fell, and the gates of the Temple sank into the ground, her gates have sunk into the ground (Lamentations 2:9), and they came down through the dirt to the place where Korach was. He put his hands on them. He had owned three towers of Egyptian silver and three hundred mules of keys, and now here were the doors of the House, down at his level with the hinges still on them. He believed it then. When these gates rise, he said, we rise with them.

They were appointed keepers of the gates, and they are holding them down there still, waiting to come up.